Jeff Atwood

community March 1, 2011

Redesigned Users Page

After 2.5 years of being almost unchanged, we decided it was high time the Users page got a redesign. The old user page was fine, in a late 2008 sort of way, but it ultimately became a bit monotonous — every time you viewed it, you’d see more or less the same list of top…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community February 22, 2011

Are Some Questions Too Simple?

On Podcast #58, Joel and I had a disagreement. Not the first, and certainly won’t be the last: Joel says that the only bad simple question is a duplicate simple question. I say simple questions are OK as long as they’re actually interesting (in some way) for other users to consider and answer. To prove…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
api February 18, 2011

Stack Apps and Scripts

As part of our ongoing improvement to our 1.1 API release, and the site that supports our API, stackapps.com, we’ve extended Stack Apps to support the listing of browser scripts. Since Stack Overflow began, there have been tons of nifty browser scripts people have created to enhance their experience — and they usually work on…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background February 16, 2011

Blekko and Stack Overflow

I’ve been a longtime fan of Rich Skrenta, who you might know as the author of the world’s first computer virus. He’s also on our board of advisors, and he founded a search startup — blekko.com. Blekko’s claim to fame is that it attempts to meld human curation with traditional Google-style search algorithms. It’s what…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
api February 11, 2011

Stack Exchange API 1.1 and Improved App Gallery

We just rolled out version 1.1 of the Stack Exchange API. To see what’s new, browse the revised documentation at: api.stackoverflow.com/1.1/usage Rebecca took an informal survey of the API developer community at Stack Apps, and determined that what everyone wanted most (beyond v2 of the API, yes, I know) was an improved application gallery. So…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community February 10, 2011

Community Conference Sponsorships

In A Recipe to Promote your Site we noted that we would match community effort with funds: Any community that shows sufficient effort and innovative ideas to promote their site will be offered a budget and resources to make those ideas happen. Think of it as matching funds — except we’re matching effort, innovation, resources,…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community February 5, 2011

Suggested Edits and Edit Review

The Stack Exchange engine draws inspiration from a number of sources. We continue to be great admirers of Wikipedia, but we’ve always missed out on one crucial aspect of their system: we never allowed anonymous users to edit content. No, that required earning privileges through participation — specifically, the retag privilege at 500 reputation and…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community February 4, 2011

Welcome Our New Trilogy Moderators for 2011!

The trilogy elections are now complete. Welcome our new trilogy moderators for 2011! Stack Overflow Server Fault Super User I hereby declare the new election process, at least as judged by the quality of the final candidates and the eventual winners, a resounding success! Thank you for so generously contributing your time to keep your…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community February 2, 2011

Moderator Messages

First, a quick update on the Stack Exchange moderator election schedule. Ending today, so get those votes in! serverfault.com/election superuser.com/election stackoverflow.com/election Ending soon: programmers.stackexchange.com/election cstheory.stackexchange.com/election gamedev.stackexchange.com/election Just started: webapps.stackexchange.com/election askubuntu.com/election gaming.stackexchange.com/election Coming soon, in this order, at 3 per week: webmasters.stackexchange.com/election (Feb 7) cooking.stackexchange.com/election (Feb 7) photo.stackexchange.com/election (Feb 7) stats.stackexchange.com/election (Feb 14) tex.stackexchange.com/election (Feb 14)…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community January 28, 2011

Stack Overflow Search — Now 81% Less Crappy

Google has ruined search for everyone. By that I mean they have done it so long, so fast, and so well — despite the recent speed bump — that users simply expect everyone’s search to be as good as Google’s. And that is … challenging. Particularly considering Google is an enormous company now, with server…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community January 24, 2011

Stack Exchange 2011 Elections Begin

After running a beta community moderator election on math.stackexchange, and launching 2011 community moderator elections on the trilogy sites, we are now rolling out community moderator elections to all the public Stack Exchange 2.0 sites. When we selected Moderators Pro Tempore on the public beta sites, we tried to be quite clear that the eventual…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)