Today, we're proud to announce the new Stack Exchange blog, all shiny and new! It's been six to eight weeks in the making and we're really happy our community can finally see it. Here's an overview of the major changes that we've made to the site:
Channels
The biggest change we've made is the introduction of channels on the blog. In the previous blog, we pretty much put everything in one column, organized by tags. We still have all the posts in chronological order on the homepage of the new blog, but we realized there are two big buckets of content that we want to post here: company news and engineering posts. We want to recast our blog not just as a place to post updates as they come, but to become an amazing source of news, technical knowledge, and insight into the communities we've built.
Company News Channel
Engineering Channel
There's a subsection for each major part of our engineering team: developers, SREs, designers, and anyone else that touches our product creation process. As we grow, you can expect to see more content fill up here, and possibly bring in outside contributors as well.
An all new design
The most notable thing that we changed is the overall design. We wanted to make something that people enjoy reading, exploring, and learning from. Most of all the things from the previous blog still exist: previous posts with archived comments, tagged posts sortable by category, and so on. We've also added some additional functionality here: new navigation that emphasizes our new channels and content, posts sortable by author, and better feeds with individual post pages for readability. Take a look around, there's a lot of changes we've made here.
Open source
If you have suggestions for how to make the new blog better, create an issue and one of our developers will take a look at it (probably me). If you're a developer, we encourage you to take a look at the source code and make pull requests for changes as well. If you want a walkthrough of how we built the blog, take a look at the engineering channel for an inside look.
More to come
There's so much more we want to do with this blog in the future. It's one of the few places we have as a company to talk directly to the community we've helped build and love so much. As always, sound off in the comments about what you think of the changes, ideas you have about how to make it better, or take an extra step and become a contributor writing code. Until next time!
Jon is a developer and heads up evangelism efforts at Stack Exchange. You can follow him on Twitter.