Yearly Archives: 2008

We want Stack Overflow* users to be able to personalize their questions and answers with a small picture — even if they’ve never created an account on our site. Rather than build this functionality ourselves, we’ve decided to take advantage of Gravatars. Gravatars are small images associated with your email address. I’ve used Gravatar for…

Where do you stand on The Great Dub-Dub-Dub Debate? Some people become very religious about whether URLs should have a www. prefix or not. Me, I’m a bit more sanguine: I think you need to choose your allegiance early in the lifecycle of your website, and stick to it. So, for stackoverflow, we’re going with…

Here’s one decision we’re pondering as we build stackoverflow, and I’d like to get your feedback on it: Is it OK to require JavaScript to participate? Note that by “participate” I mean “edit, answer or ask a question”. Of course passively reading a question and the associated answers will work fine without JavaScript enabled. In…

Question and answer entry will be arguably the most crucial piece of stackoverflow. I used the post Is HTML a Humane Markup Language? as a form of collaborative research to determine what our Q&A; editor should look like. Based on the (extensive!) feedback, I’ve reached three conclusions: Most programmers want either an HTML subset or…