page-mascot puts a small character that watches the cursor on any website, in 805 stars

Marketing pages built by a small team tend to look tidy and sterile: the type is set, the colours are chosen, the reader stays for four seconds and leaves. page-mascot, a small React component that puts a hand-drawn character on the page and has it watch the cursor, wants to change that in one afternoon. It went public on 2026-09-14 and had 805 stars on GitHub twelve days later, read on 2026-09-26.

The page-mascot README sums it up in one line: "An interactive character that watches the cursor and blinks when you poke it." The React component takes two image paths, a size in pixels and an accessibility label. Author is Kamran Ahmed, under the MIT license.

What the character does

Each mascot is drawn once as two 3x3 sprite sheets. One sheet holds nine head positions for the direction the cursor sits in, and the other holds nine expressions the character can react with. As the visitor moves the mouse, the head follows the cursor angle. A small dead zone stops the head from jittering when the cursor is close. A click swaps to a reaction expression for half a second. The React tag is <Mascot directions="..." reactions="..." /> with an optional size in pixels; the size defaults to 140, and everything else is a normal React prop.

The component knows when it is not welcome. On a phone or a tablet, tracking is off. When the visitor's browser prefers reduced motion, the mascot goes still. Neither of these takes a config flag: they read the browser's own signal and behave.

The 52 characters, and the one you draw yourself

The demo page at koboyo.com/page-mascot is a wall of fifty-two ready-made mascots the repo ships with: a cat, a fox, an owl, a chibi otter, a small robot, and a lot more. Any one of them drops into a page as two files. Six rendering styles come in the same set: colour, ink, sketch, riso, paper and pixel, all aligned on the same 3x3 grid so a swap does not break the layout.

The interesting part is the agent skill. A prompt like "a chibi otter with chocolate-brown fur" runs a Claude Code or Codex skill that draws the nine directions, draws the nine expressions, builds both sheets so the character looks the same across every cell, and wires the component into the page. The skill can use Codex to generate the images, or call OpenAI's API directly with an OPENAI_API_KEY. The character comes back checked and installed rather than pasted in as raw output.

Where the traction points

Kamran Ahmed is a real developer, and the repo has picked up 805 stars in twelve days on GitHub, from the GitHub API read on 2026-09-26. That is a rate roughly one star an hour since the first commit. Small interactive touches on marketing pages sit in the same category as micro-copy and colour: they are what a visitor remembers, not what a founder has time to make. A component that ships fifty-two of them and an agent skill for drawing more moves the cost from a week of illustrator time to an afternoon of prompting.

Source

• nilbuild/page-mascot, MIT license, 805 stars as read on 2026-09-26
• koboyo.com/page-mascot, the live demo with all fifty-two characters