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Offline!

This app is no longer supported. But perhaps the source code at GitHub may be useful.

Screenshots

Main Page

Main Page

Supports all Stack Exchange sites via StackAuth

Full API Support

Search for users on any site to stalk

User Search

About

I created this for fun and for a chance to play around with GWT & Google's App Engine. It's a tongue-in-cheek application to give people, who are sick of Jon Skeet and his excellent answers, a head-start on the kinds of questions he typically goes for. I originally wanted to call this StackStalker (and hence make it more generic) but it looks like that name is already taken.

I pull the latest Unanswered Questions from the API and filter them based on the 20-most popular tags for the user in question. It then further filters out questions that the user has already posted answers for. That list goes into the table you can see in the screenshot and the oldest entries get rolled off as appropriate.

I'm using the stackoverflow-java-sdk StackWrap4J library, which I've found has saved me a massive number of headaches. I'd like to thank @Bill the Lizard and @jjnguy for their help in getting it to work with AppEngine.

I'm going to try and follow the 'release early, release often' doctrine. If anyone has any ideas (I have a few) about how to make this better, funnier, more awesome (ponies? unicorns?), etc. please let me know. And in case you couldn't already tell, I'm not much of a UI guy, but I'll see what I can do...

License

GPL v3. If this doesn't suit you, drop me a line and I'm sure we can work something out.

Download

The deployed application can no longer be found at: http://skeetstalker.appspot.com/

Platform

Java 6, Google App Engine 1.3.5 and GWT 2.0.4

Contact

Leave a comment/answer to this question or email catchwa [at] gmail [dot] com

It's entry on StackList is here.

Code

Source code can be found on GitHub.

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  • 1
    +1 Nice application.Could be interesting to make it more general, stalking other guru like Alex Martelli in Python.
    – systempuntoout
    Commented Jun 11, 2010 at 14:14
  • 14
    You idiot!!! Now Jon Skeet knows what questions he should answer and he'll send his bots onto those questions and answer them!!!!! In all seriousness though, nice app. Simple, yet effective!
    – Matt S.
    Commented Jun 11, 2010 at 14:15
  • 3
    Will people stalk me on StackApps?
    – Nathan Osman
    Commented Jun 11, 2010 at 14:17
  • Thanks for the comments, guys. I'm in the process of making it more generic now (but still having Jon Skeet as the default stalkee). I'm also taking the opportunity to use JDO to cache some of the query results to be considerate to the API :)
    – Catchwa
    Commented Jun 12, 2010 at 8:34
  • 3
    I had an idea for an app called BeatJonSkeet -- you see if you can best his (or someone else) reputation for a certain period of time. :)
    – InfinitiesLoop
    Commented Jun 15, 2010 at 5:14
  • @Catchwa, I just wanted to mention that StackWrap4J currently supports the latest version (0.9) of the API. It doesn't look like the wrapper you are using has been updated in a while.
    – jjnguy
    Commented Jun 25, 2010 at 14:50
  • @jjnguy thanks for the suggestion. However, the API I'm using is actually updated pretty regularly (look at the actual mercurial repo, not the beta snapshot): code.google.com/p/stackoverflow-java-sdk/source/list
    – Catchwa
    Commented Jun 27, 2010 at 4:55
  • It's the least I could do :)
    – Catchwa
    Commented Jul 28, 2010 at 23:07
  • 4
    Actually I'm using it to stalk myself in order to find posible questions that I may be able to answer.
    – Carlos Muñoz
    Commented Jul 29, 2010 at 8:34
  • How do you determine which questions to show? Following Carlos' idea, I tried it with my own user ID and it suggests questions that I don't really know anything about.
    – Dan Dyer
    Commented Aug 4, 2010 at 0:44
  • It's based on your 20 most-used tags. Having a look at your SO profile it's mainly java but then a lot of language-agnostic tags so I guess you're going to get a whole gamut of stuff. I suppose that one improvement I could make would be to score unanswered questions based on combinations of tags? e.g. If an unanswered question contains 5 of your top 20 tags then it gets prioritised over one that only hits one of your top 20 tags.
    – Catchwa
    Commented Aug 4, 2010 at 3:24
  • Do you track related questions, and push them up higher on the list?
    – Mateen Ulhaq
    Commented May 18, 2011 at 3:10
  • Can you make it possible to stalk multiple people at one time?
    – daviesgeek
    Commented Sep 9, 2011 at 5:04
  • 2
    Let me guess who the 1 downvote was...
    – Mechanical snail
    Commented Aug 17, 2012 at 8:30
  • 4
    Why not just StalkOverflow?
    – Dan Lugg
    Commented Feb 8, 2013 at 15:15

6 Answers 6

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Version 5

  • (Finally) updated to API version 1.0
  • Now using the StackWrap4J library (thanks to @Bill the Lizard and @jjnguy for helping me with the teething problems)
  • StackAuth support (drop-down list of StackExchange sites is pulled from StackAuth dynamically)
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3

Just thought I'd post an update as an answer so people can see it more easily.

Version 2

The deployed application is now generic (see screenshot), but defaults to Jon Skeet. You can now stalk anyone you like on any of the sites that the API supports (just get their user id from their profile url). This obviously increases the load on the API but I'm using the App Engine datastore to cache API queries.

My next thing to improve is to make it easier to put in the user id (e.g. search by username and then populate the field that way). Plus, anything that people suggest ;)

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3

Version 3

Added a search function so you can easily find someone's ID. At the moment it will return the top 10 (or less) results. I figure that most people when searching should be able to narrow things down that far :)

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2

Version 4

  • API updated to v0.9 (thanks nabeelmukhtar!)
  • External links (e.g. to user profiles or to the questions themselves) will open in a new tab/window
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2

Bug

The link to the user profile is wrong: http://http://api.stackoverflow.com/users/22656 (should be http://api.stackoverflow.com/users/22656 http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656).

Screenshot:

Problem screenshot

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1

Was just wondering about this:

pull the latest Unanswered Questions from the API and filter them based on the 20-most popular tags for the user in question

I put in my own ID to stalk myself and I got a question in the list tagged php (And some other tags) which are far far off my top 20 tags.

Does it first look at unanswered posts and then go by their tags?

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