One unwanted side effect of launching so many awesome new Stack Exchange network sites is that the more you participated in, the harder it became to keep track of all your questions, answers, and comments across every site you participated on. That’s kind of a bummer.

Well, I’m pleased to announce we’ve added a new global inbox to every site in our network. On the genuine^tm Stack Exchange logo in the upper left hand corner, the one you already know and love — you may see a new, small red numeric indicator light up:

That small red number tells you how many new replies you have across the entire Stack Exchange network of websites. And by replies, I mean:

1. New answers to your questions
2. New comments on your posts
3. @replies to you in comments

Click the number to go directly to the global inbox.

At any given time, the inbox will contain a list of the last 30 global messages for your account, along with:

• The site icon, so you know which site the message is from
• The title of the question the message is associated with
• A preview excerpt of the first few characters of the message
• The relative age of the message (in a tooltip, so hover your mouse to see it)

Clicking through on any global inbox item will of course take you directly to the specific question on the target site.

Hopefully the new global inbox will make it easier to keep track of your questions, answers, and comments across the entire network!

(and yes, we’re looking at ways for chat to discreetly insert @reply mentions in the global inbox as well.)

As you can see from our network configuration, HAProxy is a much beloved part of our infrastructure. Willy Tarreau, the author, has been extremely responsive and helpful to us in the past.

So when we reached a surprising dead-end in our quest to find a reverse proxy that could block HTTP clients using too much bandwidth, or too many connections, we were happy to approach Willy with the idea of sponsoring this feature in HAProxy.

I’m pleased to announce that this new HAProxy feature we sponsored is now available to everyone as of August 26th!

Geoff Dalgas and Jeff Atwood described to me in great details what they needed to do : perform request throttling per IP address, possibly based on various criteria, in order to limit risks of service abuse. That was very interesting, because that feature was being thought about for about 4 years without enough time to completely develop it …

…

The last words naturally go to the really cool guys at Stack Overflow. It’s very nice to see some sites and companies involve time and money and take risks to make Open Source products better. Of course they benefit from this work, but at no point during the whole development did they try to reduce the focus to their specific needs, quite the opposite. From the very first exchanges, their goal clearly was to make the product better, and that must be outlined. That’s now achieved and I really appreciate their involvement. Thank you guys!

If you’d like more details, Kyle Brandt, our sysadmin extraordinaire, documented the details of how this new HTTP connection and bandwidth limiting feature works over at the Server Fault Blog. Kyle also worked extensively with Willy to make sure everything went smoothly, and it’s a credit to both of them, because it absolutely did. This big new feature worked more or less as advertised right out of the gate.

We hope to be able to sponsor more open source projects in this manner. Our specific goal is to “make the internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions”, but I believe this is still secondary to our primary goal: make the internet better. And having a freely available open source reverse proxy that lets you run a site of our size (top 500 on the internet by some accounts) without being accidentally undermined by abusive or poorly written HTTP clients, is a win for not just us — but everyone!

After nearly two and a half months, our Stack Exchange API contest is officially over. In that time, our community created 85 applications and 24 libraries.

It was tough judging winners between so many fantastic entries. I encourage you to browse the complete list of apps and libraries to see for yourself how much cool stuff the community created. Whatever your platform of choice, there’s something here for you to work with, learn from, and perhaps even contribute back to.

Most Entries

We’re awarding Lilliput USB Monitors to two members of the community who single-handedly contributed a huge number of apps and libraries to the contest.

12 applications — SOAPI-Watch, SOAPI-Explore …
2 libraries — Soapi.CS and Soapi.JS

9 applications — StackMobile.com, StackApplet, …
5 libraries — so++, stack.PHP …

Kudos to George Edison and code poet for being such integral parts of the StackApps community.

Library

Stacky – a .NET Client Library

Stacky is a .Net client library for the Stack Apps API. It’s a simple library supporting a variety of platforms such as Silverlight and Windows Phone 7, .NET 4 and .NET 3.5.

adjustable height GeekDesk winner

Third Place

Six to Eight : an iOS client

Six to Eight is a free, pocket sized iOS client, for you to track your activity and get answers to those niggly, “need an answer right now” problems. Full browsing, searching, statistics and user tracking. App Store link (free)

CULV netbook winner

Second Place

StackPrinter: the Stack Exchange Printer Suite

StackPrinter is a website that pulls the main details of a given question, all its answers, comments and votes formatting them in a simple essential printable view.

I’ve created this micro web application basically to add a “Printer-Friendly” feature to the Stack Exchange Network sites, trying to remove some @Media Print CSS limitations like hidden comments, pagination and empty spaces.

Herman Miller Mirra chair winner

First Place

StackTack, a Javascript widget you can stick anywhere

StackTack is a widget for bloggers and writers to easily tack questions and answers from the Stack Exchange sites such as Stack Overflow, Server Fault and Super User, into their articles. The widget remains up to date as answers get added, modified, voted on and accepted.

30″ Dell or Apple LCD winner

We’ve contacted all the winners via email and we’ll be arranging shipment of your prizes ASAP. Additionally, anyone with an entry in the contest that had 3 or more score at the time of judging was sent a Stack Overflow, Server Fault, or Super User t-shirt of their choice — and naturally a bunch of stickers.

Congratulations to everyone who entered the contest. Your feedback helped us drive the API forward and make it better for everyone — but most importantly, you built amazing apps and libraries!

You guys rock. And, yes, keep your eyes peeled for Stack Exchange API 2.0 sometime next year.

I’m proud to announce that stackexchange.com is now the official network hub for the entire Stack Exchange 2.0 network!

Thanks to the herculean contributions of team members David Fullerton and Emmett Nicholas, our shiny new network hub contains:

1. A list of the most interesting questions right now, across the entire Stack Exchange network
2. A directory, with statistics and rankings, of all public sites in the Stack Exchange network
3. A per-site user reputation league for all Stack Exchange websites

But how do you know you’re on a Stack Exchange 2.0 network website?

Why, I’m glad you asked!

Just check for the genuine^tm Stack Exchange logo in the upper left hand corner. If you see that, you can be sure it’s the real deal, and not some brand-x knockoff site. Better yet … click it!

That’s right, stackexchange.com is now so awesome that every one of our sites carries a wee mini pocket version of it along with them, like a kangaroo with a joey in its pouch.

And that’s not all. We’ve also rolled out something that’s been requested for a very long time: Reputation Leagues.

For any Stack Exchange website, you can see monthly, weekly, and quarterly reputation league user rankings, along with velocity (change per time interval). This strictly a for fun feature — it’s meant as a friendly, informal way of tracking your reputation on a particular Stack Exchange site. (Not that these reputation leagues won’t inevitably become a bloodthirsty fight to the death, but hey — I tried. It really is just for fun and stats junkies!)

I’m proud to finally have a network anchor site worthy of the name. We’re still in the process of adding many more features, performance tweaks, and bugfixes to stackexchange.com, but it’s a promising start, and a major milestone toward our overall Stack Exchange 2.0 network vision.

Enjoy!

I’m pleased to announce we now have a full-time, bona fide designer on our team: Jin Yang.

I worked with Jin a bit in constructing the Super User design last year, but he was absolutely instrumental in putting together our amazing Area 51 design and the equally impressive ‘sketchy’ design for the current Web Applications site proposal private beta.

(click through for fuller sized screenshots)

update: now in public beta, visit webapps.stackexchange.com to see the design live!

If you committed to Web Apps, you should be on the private beta whitelist to visit the site and see the design for yourself. Otherwise, Web Apps will move into public beta on the 7th, and you can check it out then. More private betas of Area 51 sites which have reached the private beta threshold are forthcoming. If there’s a site proposal you’d like to see exist, be sure you commit to it on Area 51 — and share the proposal link with anyone else who might be interested!

I think the excellence of Jin’s design work speaks for itself. He also has a strong background as a web developer (yes, he can code — I can testify to that, as I met him in a previous job 7 years ago) and he’s one of the most pragmatic designers I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. You can check out more of his work, and his outstanding blog, at 8164.org. Keep an eye open for new blog entries covering the specifics of the work he did on Area 51!