Jeff Atwood

company May 13, 2011

Sponsoring Lucene.Net Logo Design Contest

Back in January we rebooted our search implementation, replacing it with Lucene.Net. We’ve been quite happy with the results, which are faster, more relevant, and … perhaps not Google quality, but certainly getting closer to the realm of Googlesque. We are also big fans of the Lucene.Net project, which has had some rocky times of…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community May 6, 2011

Vote For This Question or The Kitten Gets It

When the wordpress.stackexchange.com community asked Why are questions not being voted on … I have noticed a trend that questions (even good ones) that have multiple answers are not being voted on. Out of our 5,550 questions only 41% have at least 1 vote which leaves around 3,000 with 0 votes and a few hundred…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community April 29, 2011

Inline Comment and Post Markdown Help

We use Markdown for text formatting on all Stack Exchange sites. Markdown isn’t difficult to figure out, particularly since it apes common ASCII formatting conventions — and its simplicity means it is amenable to wiki style differencing and editing, which is a big part of our engine. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do a…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community April 27, 2011

Improved Tag Sets

Earlier this month, Emmett asked for feedback on what we should improve next on stackexchange.com. The consensus seemed to be that the existing functionality was good, but it could be simpler to use — as expressed by Pekka: I miss the carefully crafted minimalism that I’ve come to love so much on SO. From that…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community April 12, 2011

Stack Exchange Partners with MathJax

I’m pleased to announce that Stack Exchange is now a major supporting partner of MathJax. MathJax is, of course, an open source JavaScript display engine for mathematics that works in all modern browsers. It’s a joint project of the American Mathematical Society, Design Science, Inc., and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. We love…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community April 8, 2011

Stack Exchange Network Profiles

If you participate on multiple Stack Exchange sites, you now have a global profile page! You can navigate there via the handy network profile link on your user page. From your network profile, you can get a mile high view of all your activity across every site in our network. Yep, all of ’em! The…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community April 5, 2011

Helping The Experts Get Answers

In A Recipe to Promote your Site, Robert provided a great set of guidelines for organically growing your Q&A; community. Buried within was this observation: Reach the right kind of publications and bloggers. Make sure that the key experts in every field know about the site; not just the “Martha Stewart” big names; we want…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community March 29, 2011

R.I.P. Envelope, Hello Improved User Pages

If you’ve used any Stack Exchange site over the last year, you’re probably familiar with “the envelope”. The envelope was a notification system that … sort of … let you know when things happened on the site. As time went on, it became clear that the envelope was a deeply flawed design. I began thinking…
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Co-Founder (Former)
background March 25, 2011

Welcome Valued Associate Josh Heyer

Our community team has been growing by leaps and bounds: Robert Cartaino — Palm Bay FL — Apr 19, 2010 Rebecca Chernoff — St. Louis MO — Jan 4, 2011 Dori Smith — Healdsburg CA — Feb 25, 2011 We’re serious about building community — and that means having a full time team dedicated to…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community March 24, 2011

Redesigned Tags Page

In the spirit of our recent redesign of the users page, we felt it was time to enhance the tags page, too. As you can see, the tags page now shows a bit more information about each tag, namely: The first three lines of the tag wiki excerpt for the tag. The number of questions…
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Co-Founder (Former)
background March 7, 2011

Stack Overflow and the Computer History Museum

Last summer, we sponsored the Computer History Museum. The sponsorship coincided with a massive 25,000 square foot museum renovation for a new exhibit which opened in January, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing. I finally got a chance to visit, and it is stunning. They took all the computers in their giant visual storage…
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Co-Founder (Former)
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