user experience

seo

The Importance of Sitemaps

So I’ve been busy with this Stack Overflow thing over the last two weeks. By way of apology, I’ll share a little statistic you might find interesting: the percentage of traffic from search engines at stackoverflow.com. Sept 16th one day after public launch10%October 11th less than

By Jeff Atwood ·
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user experience

The Perils of FUI: Fake User Interface

As a software developer, tell me if you’ve ever done this: 1. Taken a screenshot of something on the desktop 2. Opened it in a graphics program 3. Gone off to work on something else 4. Upon returning to your computer, attempted to click on the screenshot as if

By Jeff Atwood ·
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music

Music to (Not) Code By

Occasionally people will ask me what kind of music I like to code by. I’m not sure I am the right person to ask this question of. Allow me to explain by citing my 2001 Amazon review of a particular album. It all started so innocently. I purchased this

By Jeff Atwood ·
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software development concepts

iTunes is Anti-Web

Ever find yourself clicking on links to music or videos and getting blasted in the face with this delightful little number? That’s right – links to any sort of music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, audiobooks or anything else available through Apple’s iTunes store requires custom software to be installed

By Jeff Atwood ·
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web development

Smart Enough Not To Build This Website

I may not be smart enough to join Mensa, but I am smart enough not to build websites like the American Mensa website. Do you see the mistake? If so, can you explain why this is a mistake, and why you’d desperately want to avoid visiting websites that make

By Jeff Atwood ·
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software development concepts

Finally, a Definition of Programming I Can Actually Understand

I believe very strongly that a blog without comments is not a blog. For me, the whole point of this blogging exercise is the many-way communication of the comments – between me and the commenters, and among the commenters themselves. As I said in How To Advertise on Your Blog Without

By Jeff Atwood ·
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security

Please Give Us Your Email Password

A number of people whose opinions I greatly respect have turned me on to Yelp over the last six months or so. Yelp is a community review site, and a great way to discover cool new places in whatever neighborhood you happen to be in. I’ve enjoyed using Yelp,

By Jeff Atwood ·
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ui design

Whatever Happened to UI Consistency?

Although I rather like Windows Vista – I think the amount of Vista nerd rage out there is completely unwarranted – there are areas of Vista I find hugely disappointing. And for my money, nothing is more disappointing than the overall fit and finish of Vista, which is truly abysmal. It’s

By Jeff Atwood ·
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authentication

OpenID: Does The World Really Need Yet Another Username and Password?

As we continue to work on the code that will eventually become stackoverflow, we belatedly realized that we’d be contributing to the glut of username and passwords on the web. I have fifty online logins, and I can’t remember any of them! Adding that fifty-first set of stackoverflow.

By Jeff Atwood ·
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software development

Twitter: How Not To Crash Responsibly

In yesterday’s post on Crashing Responsibly, I outlined a few ways to improve your application’s crash behavior. In the event that your application crashes – and oh, it will – why not turn that crash into something that: * Records lots of diagnostic information developers can use to improve the application

By Jeff Atwood ·
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html

Is HTML a Humane Markup Language?

One of the things we’re thinking about while building stackoverflow.com is how to let users style the questions and answers they’re entering on the site. Nothing’s decided at this point, but we definitely won’t be giving users one of those friendly-but-irritating HTML GUI browser layout

By Jeff Atwood ·
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software development

Cleaning Your Display and Keyboard

Let’s say, just as a hypothetical, you’re sitting at your computer, casually chatting with a fellow programmer. You begin to describe some bit of code, then bring it up on your display to illustrate. You want to highlight some particular part of the code. Perhaps you move the

By Jeff Atwood ·
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