The site is focused on the interaction between software developers which is truly how most of us learn the best — by working with, interacting with and drawing on the wisdom of other developers.

The site draws on a whole bunch of different elements that set it apart from other Q&A sites.  Creator Jeff Atwood describes Stack Overflow as a free Q&A site that’s built and maintained by the community of developers.

While the site was built to answer developers’ questions, it also has some stiff competition in the form of the Experts’ Exchange.  Most developers know about EE, and are annoyed by the fact that the site purports to charge money for access to the answers to development questions.  As it turns out, it’s all available for free, you just need to look around a bit harder to find stuff.

Stack Overflow has been built with transparency and ease of use in mind since its inception; the model is to get as many eyeballs on a question as needed to get a good answer.  Good questions and good answers are up-voted by the community — similar to the way Digg works, except it’s harder to game the system.  Up-votes provide reputation points which at lower levels unlock some of the site’s features.  The site also gives out badges for meeting certain goals on the site, based on the ability to get badges or special goals on Xbox live.

Jeff Atwood’s passion is around developing software from a more human perspective. Much of the design of the site for Stack Overflow, and the code behind it are based on driving positive behaviours within the developer community.  Instead of lots of hard-and-fast rules, there are easy ways to do good things, and more difficult ways to do things that shouldn’t be overdone.

As a side-note, Stack Overflow’s codebase is written in C# using the ASP.NET MVC framework, and has been in use since the very early CTP days of MVC.  It’s a great example of the power that can be brought to bear on the web with this toolset.

I love the site, it’s been a great resource for me for the past year or so, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has a development dilemma that they need to solve.

Anything that helps to foster conversation between people who are passionate about a topic is a good thing in my book.  If it involves code and geekery, so much the better.

It’s a great idea, and I hope to see one (or a few) organized in and around Vancouver before too long… otherwise I’ll have to set one up.  The closest one as of this posting is in Redmond. Cool, but I don’t think I can justify a two hour drive down for dinner. Not yet, anyway.

Check out NerdDinner.com and meet up with some nerds in your community!

The system allows you to create a single phone number, to which you can aggregate other numbers to have a unified system for voice and messaging.

I’ve been trying to get myself a Grand Central account for several months, but I guess with the lead up to the Google Voice launch they haven’t been creating new numbers for people.  It looks, from a post on the Google Voice help site, that the service will be rolling out over the next few weeks.  The service will first be made available to existing Grand Central users, and rolled out to the rest of the great unwashed as it matures in the next few months.

There’s no indication at this stage if the service will be geographically limited but I suspect that, intitially at least, the service will only offer US-based phone numbers at launch.

That said, I was contemplating this evening whether it would be possible to offer both full and summary feeds from kdmurray.net.  The reason? I wanted to start pushing partial posts to Facebook with a minimum of fuss.

The problem? WordPress only supports one post feed out of the box.

The solution?  Stephen Cronin‘s DualFeeds plugin (which I found thanks to @bluefur on Twitter).  The plugin allows you to create multiple feeds one for full-posts, and a second for post summaries.  This is a very elegant solution to the problem.  Though I wanted to add the stuff into Facebook, I didn’t want to push whole posts because I did want to try and use this to drive some traffic to the site.

Technically the plugin works very well.  I was able to set it up in just a couple of minutes and after about 15 minutes of testing have found that it plays nice with FeedBurner’s FeedSmith plugin, as well as my other feed-related plugin FeedEntryHeader — the latter as it turns out was also written by Stephen Cronin.

If you’ve ever wanted to be able to offer multiple feeds from your site, have a look at DualFeeds.  Works like a charm.

Twitter has snapped up the IP behind a couple of popular Web 2.0 services.  I Want Sandy and Stikkit were both acquired by Twitter a few weeks ago.  The services were originally scheduled to go offline last week, but this window has been extended until the end of business (17:00 PT) this Friday, December 19th.

Check out the original post over on the AGP blog.

Time will tell…

• Matt’s official post on the WordPress development blog
• WordPress weekly Podcast which will spend some time talking about the release on Friday (5pm PT, 8pm ET (noon in Sydney))
• Lorelle on WordPress with some additional release info

If you’ve not tried 2.7 yet, read over the new info then give it a shot.  The super-new-and-improved admin interface is well worth the upgrade!

January 24th and 25th in Whistler a meeting of WordPress minds will meet up in Whistler, BC. The keynote speaker for the event will be Blogging Evangelist Lorelle VanFossen.

If you’re in the Vancouver-Whistler area, or can plan to be here the $35 entry fee is a great price for such a high-quality event. If you’re already registered, grab a badge and pimp the event on your site, your twitter or anywhere else!

Random Image Selector - Downloads Per Day

I’m glad that it’s proven useful for people and there will be a major update coming out over the Christmas break to coincide with the WordPress 2.7 release.  This update will include a few bug fixes, a couple of minor feature changes and one significant addition.

Thanks to everyone who has downloaded the plugin, and to those who have left feedback on the blog!

The new feature provides a simple task list that can be activated using the labs menu.  To activate this, click on the green beaker at the top of the screen.

The task list in and of itself is basic, and provides a point that Google can use to extend its functionality in the future… features like integration with Google Calendar (yea, they left that out) and the ability to collaborate & share tasks through Gmail.

While this won’t likely satiate the desires of the Getting-Things-Done crowd, it’s a decent to-do list for keeping track of a non-complex list of items.  The most functional advantage that this has over desktop-based task solutions like Outlook is the ability for it to be accessed anywhere you can hit-up your Gmail.

Overall I’m a big fan of Google’s “Labs” concept. Pre-releasing new functionality in an opt-in manner is the hallmark of open-source and the web 2.0 community, and is a principle that the search giant seems to have embraced wholeheartedly.  Here’s hoping we see more useful features coming out of Mountain View.

Write or Die provides you motivation to write not based on the positive reinforcement of a job well done but on the fear of a web-based application inflicting consequences upon you.  Write or Die offers varying levels of “difficulty” from forgiving through to evil, and three types of consequences.

• Gentle mode provides a polite pop-up reminder to keep writing
• Normal mode plays REALLY awful music/sounds in the background
• Kamikaze mode will begin deleting one word per second while you’re delinquent

The fear of having one’s work deleted is a serious motivator to keep writing.

If you’ve got a writing project to do whether it’s a paper for school like me, or you’re participating in a novel-writing event (WoD was originally built for authors participating in NanNoWriMo) give Write or Die a try.

For those of you who’ve been following the development of the next iteration of WordPress you already know that 2.7 Beta 1 was released last Friday night.

WP 2.7 features some really great refinements to the admin panel which not only make it more useful, they also serve as the building blocks for the next few generations of WordPress.

I’ve been messing around with 2.7 for the last month or so on my WP sandbox and it’s been very interesting to watch the evolution of the menuing system.

I’ll be drawing up a full review for the AGP blog which I’ll post once the full release happens.

It was great to see a few familiar faces like Rebecca and Raul.

I also got to meet some of the folks who I’d only known online.  Duane, John, John & Andy.  Looking forward to meeting lots of other great people tomorrow.

I did forget one thing tonight: Business Cards.  However, I did manage to find a few spare sheets of my Avery business card blanks tonight.  I also discovered (somewhat to my surprise) that Google Docs supports Avery business card templates.

sample business card from google docs

The implementation isn’t quite as slick as MS-Word, but it will more than do in a pinch.  I managed to whip up this snazzy little number in a matter of minutes.  Now I feel more prepared for tomorrow.  Hopefully Dave doesn’t mind that I borrowed the show logo, I promise I’ll promote the show! 

This week due to some issues beyond his control, Dave is without is usual podcasting rig, including the computer and all of his audio editing tools.  So in an effort to make sure that the AGP #003 gets out as close to on-time as possible, I’ll be doing the editing and post-production for this week’s episode.

I’ve been learning some new skills, mostly thanks to Dave and with some input from the Interwebs.  So if you haven’t subscribed to the Aussie Geek Podcast yet, I suggest you do so right now and listen to last week’s show and this, and see if I did an OK job. 

I carried this on for about two months, twitter became less active for me, not much in the way of new friend requests and ultimately a complete drop-off of activity.

Yesterday I decided to unlock my profile again, and resort to the manual removal/blocking of Twitter spam.  Within a few hours I had a bunch of new requests and Twitter activity seems to be increasing more ever since.

So the question boils down to this: To protect, or not?  Do you protect your Twitter?

It’s definitely worth a look, and the new UI is much more like other Yahoo! properties like Flickr suggesting that Yahoo! corporate has had some influence in the redesign.

Some of the changes to both the UI and the feature set make Delicious much more usable.  This will definitely bring me back from FoxMarks.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved FoxMarks of late, but the web interface is iffy at best, and does cause some problems mainly because of the nature of the Java Applet.  (All I ask is to be able to copy & paste!!!)

So go check out Delicious, check me out on Delicious, and tag your best finds with “for:kdmurray” to send them my way (or “aussiegeeks” for the show).

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed4CHkN-Dkw]

Still not quite as cool as the guys and gals from “Redefined” though…

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFTT01Symx4]

I’m partial to Flickr myself.  One of its advantages is the large community around it that helps to support each others photographic endeavours.  Another is the more recently added Piknic photo-editing service which allows you to make changes and adjustments to your photos directly on the website.

I recently put together this quick “how-to” for a friend of mine and decided that I might as well share it with the world.  Without further ado, here is a step-by-step how-to on adding Flickr images to your WordPress blog.

1. Open the page of the image you want in Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kmsquared/2195515600/
2. Click on “All Sizes”
3. For most blogs, the “Medium” sized image is usually sufficient.  Its largest side will be 500px with the other scaled to match
4. Right-click the link marked “Download this image” link and “Copy Link Location” (Firefox) or “Copy Shortcut” (Internet Explorer)
5. On your blog, click the “Add Image” button in the editor 
6. Paste in the Image URL from #4 (WP will pick up dimensions automatically)
7. Done!

To add links back to the image in Flickr…

1. Go back to the Flickr page, right-click the “Back to the Flickr photo page” link in the top-left and select “Copy Link Location”
2. In WordPress click on the image that’s been added to your post, and then click the “Add Link” button in the editor.
3. Paste the URL for the Flickr photo page
4. Done!

I have installed it on the sandbox where I’m playing around with the Options theme and won’t be applying the upgrade here until I’m ready to move everything over, including the theme.

The biggest complaint from most is the redesign of the admin pages.  People don’t like change.  There is added functionality and a brand new layout to the admin screens.  After having played with it for only a couple of days, I find myself fumbling around a bit still… but overall the new look isn’t too bad.

Many of the links I used most often are now displayed in the main admin toolbar (blue links) while the less often used links are in the grey bar at the top of the page.  These are the high-level nav buttons like the dashboard.  I think this design will indeed prove effective for people who spend quite a bit of time in the admin console, but will be more difficult for casual users to adopt.

I’ll be posting updates to both the Random Image Selector plugin and the Admin Links Widget in the near future to ensure compliance with the WP 2.5 code.

The trouble had been finding the right WP theme.  Many of the ones I like visually didn’t have enough support for gadgetry & widgetry.  Being the geek that I am, this is something I prize.  Secondly, and more importantly to some, I wanted a theme that would actually pass XHTML validation and be a bit less of an SEO roadblock (that, and I’m a bit of a perfectionist geek).

I found, though a fortuitous series of bounces the Options theme by JustinTadlock. XHTML compliant, full of widgetable sections and completely customizable through CSS.  Perfect.  Now I just have to get some help with the design work… ’cause I suck.