Over the holidays we've made several improvements to isocpp.org. Many are behind the scenes where most readers won't notice, but here are a few that a more visible. We hope you find them useful.

Home page: Highlights from StackOverflow and StackExchange

Today, we added a new home page feature: Selected highlights from StackOverflow's [c++] and [c++11] tags, and from Programmers.StackExchange's [c++11] tag. We are pleased to endorse these sites as a premier place for question-and-answer discussion about modern C++ -- if you have a question about C++, you can probably already find the answer there, or post a new question and get a high-quality answer quickly. Please note: StackOverflow and StackExchange are for Q&A only, and actively discourage "discussion" styles -- for discussion about the Standard, see the Forums accessible from this site.

SO and SE are high-traffic sites, and many of our readers may only have time to consume a shorter "highlights reel" summary each day. That's why our home page shows an "auto-curated" filtered subset of the SO and SE traffic, selecting highlights from each feed using criteria that we can adjust over time. However, for those interested in following the full flow of questions on StackOverflow or StackExchange, we also provide a handy RSS link for each feed that lets you directly subscribe to the corresponding full feed. In the future, if there's interest, we might also consider providing our own custom RSS feeds for those who want to follow our custom filtered versions of the higher-volume SO and SE feeds.

Blog Tags

Each blog entry is now tagged, so you can more easily find the kind of content that interests you.

Here are the tags we're using initially:

• basics: General information useful to anyone using C++, including programmers coming to C++ for the first time.
• intermediate: Information that assumes you have a working familiarity with C++ and are ready to dig a little deeper.
• advanced: Information for C++ experts that assumes you know C++ pretty well, want to make the most of it, and aren't afraid to "lift the hood" from time to time to take full control.
• experimental: Material that isn't about Standard C++ today, but about what it could be -- including articles talking about future language and library extensions, and even prototype compiler implementations of future language features.

Sometimes posts will have multiple tags, when they point to material that covers useful information at more than one level. For instance, "Panel" style videos often range widely over many useful topics, and may include a lot of generally useful information appropriate to all levels while also including some pretty advanced parts of interest to experts. The goal is that if you're looking for, say, "intermediate" material, then following that tag will deliver only those items that have significant intermediate content, even if some parts may be more basic or advanced.

When you read a post, you'll see the tag(s) listed near the top. You can click on any tag to see what else has been posted with that tag. Over the next few days, we'll be adding an easy way to drill into each tag without going to a blog post first.

Blog Comments

You can now edit your own blog comments. Also, formatting control has been improved, with some more improvements coming. As always, including a nicely-formatted code block in your comment is as easy as wrapping it with <pre> and </pre>.

And More

We've also made many more improvements under the covers, and will have more to show you in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned.