2008-09-15

Joel Spolsky Co-Launches "Stack Overflow" programmer's forum

One of my favorite programming bloggers, Joel Spolsky, recently announced his latest co-project:  Stack Overflow.  This is basically a 'fixed' version of the question forum that you frequently encounter when searching for programming questions.  The improvement is that this is moderated, and the answer gets promoted to the top so that you don't have to wade through endless comments to find the answer (if you do find the answer).

It's still in beta, and it doesn't have too many users yet, so it's hard to say whether Google will give it enough PageRank to reach critical mass.  Just in case, I registered myself (using OpenID, with my blogger website -- this blog) so that I could get a low enough user number to have Web Cred.  I got #7448.  Not too bad.  If this ever grows to SlashDot proportions, people will be like "ahh, he's got a four digit user number -- he must know what he's talking about"  (says the 7-digit user number user).  Of course, it will be impossible to ever win the user number war against Jeff Atwood:  #1.

I browsed the site a little bit and couldn't find any big complaints about the user interface, although I haven't tried posting yet (I did get a 'bronze medal', though, for filling out my biographical information!).  They've got syntax highlighting on the code samples, so it can't be too bad...

I'm half tempted to move a bunch of the programming tidbits I've collected on this site over to Stack Overflow.  I just want to make sure that the answers still link over to this blog so that this blog can build web presence as well.  (One of the great things about posting useful answers in your blog is that it raises the blogs PageRank -- if these same answers are posted elsewhere, your blog doesn't improve).  Stack Overflow lets you link your website through your user profile, but you have to click the user profile first.  I've also noticed that the last person to edit the question gets the credit for asking it -- not the original asker.  This creates a situation like that game where you try to put your hand on top of another person's hand, who tries to put their hand on top of yours, until you both end up slapping each other instead of putting hands on hands...

In any case, I hope that this website builds to the point that Google gives it top PageRank for the questions it answers.  This would let me reap the benefits of this system without all the work... :)

3 comments:

  1. Geez... you had to bring up the slashdot ID. I had a four digit ID, forgot my password, signed up a year later with a five digit ID and bitterly resented it.

    I've never even heard of this site, but I'm signing up now.

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  2. I just tried to log back in to Stack Overflow, and it looks like my user account expired, probably due to inactivity. Now, if I sign up again, the best I can do is #56451. There go my plans for world domination...

    ReplyDelete

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