

BizTravel: first public StackExchange beta site - df07
http://biztravel.stackexchange.com/

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spolsky
biztravel is mostly intended so that I could dogfood StackExchange
(<http://stackexchange.com>), which is our white label version of the code
that runs StackOverflow.com. StackExchange is currently in invite-only beta. I
didn't really expect to get a critical mass of road warriors on that site
since I'm not planning to spend very much effort promoting it, but I am
interested to see how small a StackOverflow-like knowledge exchange site can
be and still get enough traffic to work.

Someone, I'm sure, will take travel Q&A far more seriously than I did, and get
someone like Rick Steves or a big travel site like Orbitz or TripAdvisor
behind it, and that'll be huge. Either way I'm pretty confident that Jeff
Atwood's goal of having knowledge exchanges like StackOverflow replace crappy
old PHPBB sites everywhere on the Internet is pretty much inevitable and this
will be a huge opportunity to create new communities where old entrenched ones
used to be locked in.

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andrewljohnson
Joel, I would like to set up a StackOverflow for Graphic Design questions.
Could I get access to the beta to do this?

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petercooper
I'm intrigued how they've got people who aren't related to StackOverflow or
programming on there already. Someone's already trying to work out what "code"
means :-) [http://biztravel.stackexchange.com/questions/11/feedback-
abo...](http://biztravel.stackexchange.com/questions/11/feedback-about-this-
site)

Just realized, I'm actually asking a question here.. how would you kick off
one of these sorts of sites if you wanted it to become popular? Pre-populate
it with a fake community? Get a group of friends to use it in anger?

~~~
nopassrecover
The remants of StackOverflow are kind of an important issue. The guy raises
good questions (how do I post maps (say Google Maps) or do other industry
specific stuff) and brings up good points about how applicable some stuff is
to non-programming sites.

~~~
petercooper
If they haven't done it already, I expect a Wordpress style "plugin" system
could cater for all this if.... it were an open source (or even self hosted)
app. Except, it ain't and I can only see "enterprise" customers finding this
app any way attractive.

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klodolph
I just went there. #1 question? "What are the must hit brothels on a biz trip
to Prague?" Yeah, that's classy right there.

~~~
jrockway
Sex!!??? On the Internet??!!! Well I never!

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dshah
Interesting pricing model. No free option and a premium (per-server based)
model for on premise. Very different from what you usually see for web-based
services. I think it might work.

Planning to try it out.

~~~
spolsky
Dharmesh, the free option in a freemium model usually exists to spread the
word, but we have StackOverflow.com to spread the word. And most of these
sites people are building will have big audiences, and those audiences are
getting it free, so we don't really need a free entry-level option just to get
our first customers.

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spicyj
It's interesting to see how similar it looks, to the pixel. Perhaps the
framework doesn't leave much room for customization.

~~~
df07
It's partly the framework, and partly because Joel threw this together on a
Friday afternoon. The only thing customized on this site is the colors and the
logo, but you can also add blocks of HTML in a bunch of places where ads are
usually shown.

~~~
spolsky
And of course you can override CSS, which we didn't bother to do.

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mattiss
I'm not a big fan of the current color scheme.

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df07
Anything in particular? As Joel said, this is mostly a beta testing site, but
feedback on the colors would be useful for picking some nice preset color
schemes.

~~~
Dylanfm
That blue used for backgrounds (i.e. the login box) is a bit too saturated and
dark. Coupled with the dark blue text, they fail in colour contrast checks
<http://skitch.com/dylanfm/b6nj6/colour-contrast-analyser> . I suggest
knocking it back to something like #B5D2E4. The greens for answered questions
are a bit dark too and could be changed to #afff4b for accepted answers and
#D1FF7E for answered. Here's a screenshot with those colours firebugged in
<http://skitch.com/dylanfm/b6nk3/biztravel> .

