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background December 16, 2009

Badges: Positive Only

There’s been no shortage of proposals for new badges since we first announced the badge system in August 2008. And we have implemented quite a few new ones since then, many of them based on community feedback: Tag-based badges Reversal and Pundit Enthusiast and Fanatic Mortarboard, Epic, and Legendary (Yes, more are planned.. I have…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background December 14, 2009

Stack Overflow Rack Glamour Shots

We installed our secondary (backup) database server tonight. Geoff took the opportunity to snap a few glamour shots of the Stack Overflow server rack at our host PEAK Internet. I present them here for your unbridled enjoyment and pleasure: update: Based on feedback from this post, we went back and improved our rack hygiene: These…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background December 13, 2009

Blog Outage – Backup Policies

On Friday, the server which hosts this blog suffered catastrophic data loss. Fortunately, the blog server is at a different datacenter entirely than PEAK, which hosts all the Trilogy sites. It’s a long story, and I’ll document it in more detail elsewhere, but the short version is this: This particular host’s (again, not PEAK) backup…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background December 8, 2009

Stack Overflow Trilogy Lego Minifigs

Courtesy of Stack Overflow user MicTech, we have the following photos of Lego characters in Trilogy-appropriate garb: The League of Web Justice has never been so darn adorable! Update: I finally got much higher resolution pictures of the Trilogy minifigs, and you can view them here.
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background November 26, 2009

Google Offers Named OpenIDs

I love Google — and I’m not just saying that because they deliver 90% of our traffic and more than 60% of user OpenIDs, I swear. But I am a little bitter that their OpenID support has two major flaws which cause us a great deal of ongoing pain: Google’s OpenIDs are domain specific. The…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background November 24, 2009

Server Fault and the PowerScripting Podcast

I was invited on as a guest of the PowerScripting Podcast last week for show 93. That show is now live! I’m a huge fan of PowerShell, which is one of the most innovative scripting languages out there. It’s a sort of post-modern, truly next generation scripting language where you’re piping actual objects-as-text around instead…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background October 23, 2009

Alternate Sorting Orders

As you know, we sort answers (and sometimes questions) in simple descending score order by default. Score is defined as upvotes minus downvotes. Way back in February, Mike Schiraldi of Reddit emailed us about an alternate sorting mechanism. After about 6 months of testing, It looks like Reddit has implemented this algorithm, and you can…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background October 15, 2009

Markdown, One Year Later

We made a few key technology bets when we created Stack Overflow: OpenID Markdown ASP.NET MVC I’ll defer the discussion on the other two items for another day, but after spending a year immersed in Markdown — the lightweight markup language we use to format posts on all Trilogy sites — I have some thoughts…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background October 7, 2009

Stickers for Stackers

Our program for world domination through stickers is well underway. Check out the cool stuff that Stack Overflow users have sent in for stickers to date: See, Stack Overflow really is built on love, internet style! I guess Joel wasn’t kidding when he said “just send us anything!” in your SASE sticker request. Let’s see…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background September 30, 2009

One Million Pageviews

A small, but arbitrary milestone in Stack Overflow history: Per Google Analytics, we finally did one million pageviews in a single day on Tuesday, September 29th. After flirting with hitting this limit all month (so many golf crowd “awww” near-miss moments), we were finally rewarded with 1,015,756 pageviews yesterday, just barely squeaking it into the…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background September 24, 2009

Congrats on 100k Rep

Sometime today, Jon Skeet reached 100,000 reputation on Stack Overflow. Congratulations! In unrelated news, there will be no podcast this week due to illness.
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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