Yearly Archives: 2008

company October 23, 2008

Stack Overflow OpenID Case Study

JanRain, an early supporter of OpenID, just posted an OpenID case study featuring Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow, much like Wikipedia, lets anyone edit anything – but unlike Wikipedia, we require users to earn a certain number of votes from other users before the system trusts them (we call this “reputation”). The concept of identity and…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company October 23, 2008

No Podcast This Week — Suggested Guests?

There will be no podcast this week, because Joel is on a business trip to Korea, apparently at webappscon. I can’t remember his exact words, but they were something along the lines of “I don’t care that the listeners want a new podcast, I am not a monkey who dances for their amusement!” I tried…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company October 21, 2008

Expressing Your Tag Preferences

Geoff “the malice from corvallis” Dalgas has done it again. Over the last week he was busy implementing the number one UserVoice request — tag preferences for a customized Stack Overflow homepage. You’ll notice there are two places you can now enter your ignored tags and interesting tags. On most question pages, in the right…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company October 18, 2008

Stack Overflow on Hanselminutes

Geoff, Jarrod and I recently recorded an episode of Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman. StackOverflow uses ASP.NET MVC – Jeff Atwood and his technical team Scott chats with Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com and most recently, stackoverflow.com. Jeff and Joel Spolsky and their technical team have created a new class of application using ASP.NET MVC. What works,…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company October 17, 2008

Stack Overflow Search – Now 51% Less Crappy

Believe it or not, the search function on Stack Overflow may just actually.. work.. now. I started to feel really bad when I’d see people post duplicate questions, even after they said they “searched first”. Now, to be clear, we do a fuzzy title-based search when you tab off the title field on the Ask…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company October 16, 2008

Podcast #26

This is the twenty-sixth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, where Joel and Jeff answer five listener questions, mostly about social software design. Warning: this podcast features cowbell. Really. Christopher Leary: “Any thoughts on the general design of karma and rep systems based on your experience building one for Stack Overflow?” Michael L Perry: “What about…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company October 13, 2008

Tags AND Tags OR Tags

Until recently, we hadn’t done a good job of providing a user interface for combining tags. You’ll notice that all the question browsers now show “related tags”, with a count of how many tags are shown for whatever view you happen to be in (with the exception of search): Let’s say I clicked on the…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company October 12, 2008

A Question About Questions

Stack Overflow is a place for programming questions. We’ve been quite clear about this for as long as I can remember; the faq and about pages both try to make this point in the first paragraph: What kind of questions can I ask here? Programming questions, of course! As long as your question is: detailed…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company October 9, 2008

Podcast #25

This is the twenty-fifth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, where Joel and Jeff sit down with the ineffable Steve Yegge, who you may know from his excellent and extremely popular blog Stevey’s Blog Rants. Steve worked for Amazon and currently works for Google. Steve proposes we use the Muppets Show theme as our podcast theme…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company October 6, 2008

Solving the “Fastest Gun in the West” problem

Some Stack Overflow users are concerned about what they call the “Fastest Gun in the West” problem: Each question’s answers are sorted by descending score and then descending time of posting. This means that if a person sits down and answers a question in a long, thorough way, going through every nook and cranny, once…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company October 5, 2008

You’re My Favorite

We just implemented another highly requested feature — the ability to mark a question as a favorite. You might have already noticed it by now, as every question has a large, clickable favorite star just under the voting arrows. Click to favorite. Click again to un-favorite. Once favorited, these questions will show up in the…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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