1. Ah yup that's true. The part of the "star" button that I was focused on was removing the "unstar" word since I find it really confusing. I'd rather use a depressed button to signify that I've starred something. But yup, removing the s's would be good.

2. Nope didn't forget it. My final design isn't "final", it's just at a point in the refactoring. The next step would be to figure out how to add in more of an identity to each repo. I tried to mention this towards the end of the article when talking about the background image idea.

3. It's hard to show in a flat mockup, but the idea for that would be that hovering it would have an animation that slightly dropped the divider down, and clicking would open it all the way. But it could totally be an over-optimization, in which case the 3-4 extra list items could just always be visible.

4. Ah, I just took the same style as GitHub. (Actually one of the cool parts of the refactor process was that GitHub's markup is so self-evident that lots of the pieces were made by just changing class names and then re-screenshotting the GitHub interface itself.)