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http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog -
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http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/03/07/redesign-launching/ -
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You should know that the link to your RSS on your front page is note working.
Location:
It's on this page:
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog
The text is:
10 Reasons to Subscribe Subscribe via: ( Email / RSS )
The links for "ten reasons" and for "email" are working. The links for the text "rss" is simply the blog url.
Just thought you should know!!
Interesting, when I opened a new tab for older posts to see how it looked, it showed the above post with a white background where on this page I see it with a black background. Maybe the post is overlapping with the background colors.
I take the above comments back. I guess you don't have black now as 85% of the page color which is what I see now. If you have a white background for most of the page and this is just a glitch and it looks great.
To be honest, your image at the top looks a little creepy. I assume you want honest comments. Though I like the setting especially as we are coming up on Spring and warmer weather.
That's my 3 cents...inflation and all.
I shouldn't have doubted you. Great job. Looks good.
~Marcie
Like the new design. I'm stealing the RSS button idea for my site.
Jimmy
Dallas, TX
Who did you outsource the design too? Can you email me their url and/or contact info?
Thx!
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Sorry, guys, but I'll have to clear this with my designer first. He last told me that he didn't want more work. Sorry! Such is the blessed life of a good Wordpress designer!
Tim
We're still fixing a few bugs, but thanks for the feedback! I'll be explaining my reasons (there are many) for the redesign, but I'm glad that most of you seem to like it. Even those who prefer the old design at first glance I think will find this version MUCH easier to use for finding good content and overlooked goodies.
Please keep the feedback coming if you find any bugs!
Thanks from Austin :)
Tim
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Same here, Rohit! Party on! Thanks for the kind words, as you are Jedi and I am a mere padawan :)
Tim
The bright green isn't my thing but it is cheerful and reminds me of money :P
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I'm dying of curiosity! Which one? See my comment about this below...
Tim
By the way, sexiness and lime green actually DO go together. Don't believe me? Check out this: http://www.amadirectlink.com/news/2006/ZX10R/gr...
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Hahahaha... which photo do you find creepy? I have a bunch that rotate -- refresh to check that out -- and can pull out or put in any ones I choose.
Let me know,
Tim
Where can I order it online?
Thanks.
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Hi Alex,
LOL... as hard as it is to believe, the UK version is launching first week of April, and I will be in London for the first week doing media. Hope that helps!
Tim
Cheers.
Which one?! I'm dying to know. Just refresh and they should rotate.
Let me know and I'll swap in something less creepy. The old iceberg photo from Calafate in Argentina, which I affectionately call "ice-half-face," is still there somewhere :)
Tim
Now, however, the photos seem to cycle through. Again, I can't be sure if it was an issue with the coding on the page or the way my computer had read it. But it's all good now.
Comments, as far as I know, seem to be working properly.
I'm pretty sure it's the other side of your face that may be creepy to some, or maybe the combination of both sides. Anyway, I'm sure you will fix it.
a) you're constipated
b) Just killed your best friend, but not sure if anyone saw it
c) 1/2 drunk
Redesign is very function, I love the favorites links. 1 suggestion: the text seems to wrap right up against the left side of the comment boxes, especiallly your comments. Perhaps you could add a little padding.
cheers
Nate
Seriously, what were you doing in that picture? Was it brussel sprouts, yerba matte backfire, one too many little bad things happen, or is this your incredible hulk attitude after turning from geek to freak?
Coupla things:
- the link in your navbar for "Book" gives me this:
(the submenu links seem fine, but the primary is wonked)
- I've hit 'refresh' about ten times, and I seem to be stuck w/ sumo wrestlers (not to mention that song in my head, "One of these things is not like the others...")
And this is kinda subjective, I realize, but... something about your old theme was more, well, 'professional' feeling. Maybe it's the font on this new one (what is it, Arial?)... but it just doesn't feel like you. Not hip enough. Feels "young", but not in a fresh way... more like 'inexperienced'.
I'm sure I'm pissing off your designer at this point, and I'm sorry, but I've got my eye on design a lot lately (my own revamp is going officially live on Monday), and it's sticking for me.
You rock, your book rocks, you rock your life... but the site seems a bit too vanilla for your amount of rock. Not sure how else to say it. But I hope it helps.
Have fun in Austin. :)
Looks cool. I see an RSS link to ProBlogger instead of to your site. I also see you are using the same domtab-powered "Most Popular" section they use. Did they design your site? Is this a proprietary system? If not, could you please share? :) I've been hunting for quite some time and haven't found it as a ready-made plugin, not even as a combination of a few plugins...
I really perfer the new design!
photo
Hope to see you around Austin..
Cheers.
Your posts also do not come up green in the comments of those old topics.
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Hi Jeremy,
Can you please explain? I'm not sure what you mean for the photos...
Thanks!
Tim
Congrats on the redesign! Change is fun!
Jen
When I go to your blog and scroll down I can see previews of the latest posts with photos, but when I go to the topics and see the previews of what is available there is no photos. For instance, before, when I clicked on "Physical Performance" I could see your before and after picture of your "Geek to Freak" post along with other posts and pictures, but now it's only the title with no pics.
Hope that helps
BTW, sorry didn't get to watch the funny video at ETech. Could post it here?
The old theme looked like a custom, professional design, this looks like a slightly tackier version of the old theme (black background and white body... noooo), and I can't see enough differences to make the change worth it. I apologize if I sound a little disappointed, but that's because I am ;-). I'm not arguing that the functionality is bad -- though your popular posts list was longer in the old theme -- but that it's just not a step up, visually.
I guess the core of what I'm saying is this: there were no blogs that looked like the old design, but there are a thousand blogs that look like this one now. Being same-ish will influence the way new visitors perceive your blog.
I would suggest contacting Collis Ta'eed to see if he's still doing design work -- he's the guy behind Freelance Switch (http://www.freelanceswitch.com) and Zen Habits.net (http://www.zenhabits.net). He's the best blog designer around, and I think your blog deserves no less.
Whatever you decide, best of luck.
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Hi Skellie,
Funny you mention ProBlogger, as I know Darren and ended up using the same designer that did his site! LOL... so, that would explain some shared features.
I totally respect your opinion. Collis is excellent, and he and I have e-mailed/"spoken" on a few occasions. He's awesome. In the end, this current new design made sense for me to test on a lot of levels. There are sites that looked like the old theme, though, as I was deeply influenced by www.pearsonified.com, among others.
This is -- like most things in my life -- just a test. We'll see where the dust settles in a month or two and I'll reassess then where I want to go with it. But, I do think that this theme is a pretty unique combination of elements that I have not seen before (more on this soon). It's based largely on my dissatisfaction with bringer people to good past content and poor above-the-fold interaction on the old theme. It was far from bad, but I think will -- with a few tweaks -- end up winning you over a bit more as you get over the "why did he change it if it wasn't broken?" feeling.
I do know the feeling, though :)
Tim
Like the new blog look.
I tried hitting refresh several times as requested to see if the pictures would rotate, but it only worked once. Got a pic of what looked like you with a bunch of Sumo wrestlers or something. Then it went back to one with you squatting some Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn looking rainforest. That picture remained on my browser in spite of my repeatedly hitting refresh.
Not a bad pic mind you. I liked that Herzog movie quite a bit and recommend it as well as the documentary that inspired it.
But, you asked for feedback about the rotating picture function, so there you are.
Cheers,
Sam
I read the first part of your book and I think that it helped change my life in the most amazing way. I really took everything you said personally and I just wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart for writing it.
Warmest regards,
Kelly Aluise
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Thank you, Kelly! I really wish you all the best... :)
Tim
I am on a Mac and Firefox, and the pictures are rotating for me. Didn't notice that before. I like the idea, and have some further ideas. Will be in touch on Monday!
~Marcie
Funny you mention ProBlogger, as I know Darren and ended up using the same designer that did his site! LOL... so, that would explain some shared features, which I really like. The favorite tabs are one example. Great display of information.
I totally respect your opinion. Collis is excellent, and he and I have e-mailed/"spoken" on a few occasions. He's awesome. In the end, this current new design made sense for me to test on a lot of levels. There are sites that looked like the old theme, though, as I was deeply influenced by www.pearsonified.com, among others, so it wasn't one of a kind.
This is -- like most things in my life -- just a test. We'll see where the dust settles in a month or two and I'll reassess then where I want to go with it.
But, I actually do think that this theme is a pretty unique combination of elements that I have not seen before (more on this soon). It's based largely on my dissatisfaction with bringer people to good past content and poor above-the-fold interaction on the old theme. It was far from bad, but I think will -- with a few tweaks -- end up winning you over a bit more as you get over the "why did he change it if it wasn't broken?" feeling. Only time will tell, of course.
I do know the feeling, though :) I'm a creature of habit and pretty fierce critic as well. I think both to be good things.
We'll see where this goes...
Tim
Om my 1024 laptop the tabs under "most popular" are piled vertically in IE. Also, the large RSS icon is sitting on top of the space between "7 Reasons to Subscribe" and "Subscribe via": These problems does not occur in Firefox. However, in both IE and Firefox the grey faded background does not go all the way to the right. It jumps to a lighter color after about two thirds from the left.
Hope this helps. Very nice looking blog!
I have a more technical comment about the rotating headers. They take too long to load.
And that's because they're saved as .png files. If you'd save them as .jpg-s, they'd be much smaller and would still look as good.
Marius
Marius
I prefer the new blog design, it's clean and simple and the most popular-box does the job selling the essentials. And that's what your concept is about. So why a longer list like Skellie mentions? She must have a bad day, her feedback is close to nonsense. ALL wordpress blogs recycle pretty much the same functions, come on!
I think it may be one of those things that girls will interpret as sexy and inviting, while the men who don't want to see it like that will interpret it as aggressive and creepy.
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LOL... thank you, Stefanie! I did take it off the rotation due to the overwhelming dislike from dudes, but I'll definitely upload it to Flickr just because you used the word "sexy" :)
Tim
Any chance of a TEXT ONLY version and button?
I use RSS for updates, mainly, and visit if things look of interest.
That said, the eye candy ain't necessary for me, I come for the content/articles, not the pictures.
My two cents.
I don't know if it's related to the re-design, but the post at:
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/09/14...
seems to have some encoding issues. The apostrophes, quotes, etc. are mixed up on my machine (Mac OS 10.4, Safari 3.0.4 and Camino
Love your book and the site! I began your book very skeptical and looking for any reason to brand you a charlatan, but as I read on, you brought be around. The content and tone of your site has only made me a bigger fan! Kampai!
The design shares problogger's problem of being solid/non-liquid, but it's not so bad at a narrower width.
It looks like there's a lot of html/escaping problems. Here's HTML Tidy's output (command used was curl -s http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/03/07... | tidy -e):-
line 145 column 457 - Warning: '<' + '/' + letter not allowed here
line 155 column 41 - Warning: missing
line 157 column 140 - Warning: unescaped & or unknown entity "&noui"
line 157 column 145 - Warning: unescaped & or unknown entity "&jump"
line 157 column 156 - Warning: unescaped & or unknown entity "&url"
line 157 column 198 - Warning: unescaped & or unknown entity "&title"
line 158 column 175 - Warning: unescaped & or unknown entity "&title"
line 159 column 143 - Warning: unescaped & or unknown entity "&uri"
line 165 column 41 - Warning: missing
line 853 column 177 - Warning: inserting implicit
line 1326 column 87 - Warning: element not empty or not closed
line 1391 column 72 - Warning: attribute with missing trailing quote mark
line 1391 column 72 - Warning: attribute with missing trailing quote mark
line 1391 column 72 - Warning: missing before
line 1392 column 191 - Warning: discarding unexpected
[the above two repeat a lot - template programming error?]
line 34 column 9 - Warning: ID "_searchsubmit" uses XML ID syntax
line 158 column 61 - Warning: escaping malformed URI reference
line 159 column 59 - Warning: escaping malformed URI reference
line 173 column 1 - Warning: anchor "comments" already defined
line 181 column 25 - Warning: anchor "comment-14660" already defined
line 184 column 88 - Warning: proprietary attribute "alt"
[the above two repeat a lot - template programming error?]
line 1326 column 87 - Warning: lacks "alt" attribute
line 1359 column 9 - Warning: anchor "subscribe" already defined
line 185 column 33 - Warning: trimming empty
line 211 column 33 - Warning: trimming empty
[the above two repeat a lot - template programming error?]
Info: Doctype given is "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
Info: Document content looks like HTML Proprietary
205 warnings, 0 errors were found!
Hope that helps. -- MJR/slef
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They wouldn't let me in! LOL... they told me you needed to RSVP in advance, and I have little patience for bargaining with doormen close to bedtime. I should be here most of this week :)
Tim
Huge fan of your writings, put a lot into motion and you've saved me time and made me money. Cheers on that.
For the new design - Comments is only at the top of your article and not the bottom currently. This means people need to scroll back to the top and click on comments if they want to read them - a bit inconvenient for regulars who enjoy the comments, and might lead to lower commenting overall.
Overall, love the site design. Cheers,
Sebastian
A couple of things I noticed:
Reading your article "The top 5 reasons to be a Jack of all trades" the speech marks and apostrophes are appearing as and . It's only a small thing, but… :-)
Also, when clicking on any of the articles in the right hand tabbed box the tab reverts back to the Recent Hits after opening the new article.
For example: when clicking on an article in Fundamentals, the article opens and the tab box reverts to the Recent Hits tab. Would be nice (and less disorientating) if it stayed on the Fundamentals tab.
Hope that was clear and good luck with the testing!
then choose to open one of the favs
the menu resets to show the 'recent hits'
just one extra click.
but if it didn't reset, and i wanted to browse your faves, i wouldn't have to reset the menu to tims favs every time.
nice layout on the whole.
I would suggest a rotating header that is automatic, not dependent on refreshing. As I am sure you are getting more and more new viewers I think it would be a great introduction to all of the great things you have done.
Mike
The old template was very 'default' looking.
You might want to consider adding nested comments though so you can reply to comments directly and have a 'tree' of conversations.
New site features are great, but I am not crazy about the design. It looks like a stock wordpress template, not a custom site. I would update the Ariel font to something more fitting and fix the date/time fields in the comment section. Some of the dates come out on 2 lines and some on 5. As for the pictures, I agree with removing the scary one and possibly updating to higher res photos.
That being said, what keeps me coming back to the site is the content and I must admit that the eye candy isn't bad either.
Cheers,
Tiffani ;)
While the last version was already very good, this one kicks it up another notch! Question. Do you keep your Twitter posts under the rest of the content for UI reasons? Also, will you have any book signings in London? May consider jumping over from "Den Hog" :)
Carpe Diem,
Peter
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Hmmm... you're making me think twice, that's for sure! To be determined...
Tim
Right now the only major issue I see is:
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/wp-content...
It seems to be a dead image which destroys the layout until you refresh the page.
location: (The Truth-Stats & Research / The USA vs. the World / reference point 23)...
if i can get the 4HWW down pat, then certainly no fear of ???...
cheers,
ai
I like the design, I do feel though that you could put nicer pictures up, really.
I do agree that the one with the side of your face is a bit creepy
I'm sure you've some nicer pictures that would do you more justice and be easier on the eye:)
Note: to the UK person asking re: 4Hww- I got my original copy b4 xmas off amazon.co.uk :)
I can't say I'd choose the colouring, but I can see that it works for you, and it suits you:) - and that's vital to reflect you!!!!
Namaste,
Carriexx
The photographer should most assuredly be from Goa.
Josh
I really like the new features - the favorites panel is a pleasant surprise, and the new Twitter integration is great.
Here are three thoughts for additional consideration:
1. While the feed icon is exquisitely placed, it is technically in violation of the Mozilla foundation's visual guidelines. Here's the excerpt: "In particular, the icon should not be displayed in a different orientation (i.e., rotated or flipped relative to the standard orientation)." Read the whole set of standards here: http://www.feedicons.com/guidelines/
2. I find the topics list difficult to read now. Perhaps using fewer main topics with subtopics would assist viewers in finding content relevant to them. Or, displaying the topics as block level elements again - which would provide a cleaner view. Particularly because each topic is a different length, my eyes don't track well from one line to the next now.
3. The only photo I have any issue with is the dance one - simply because the pixel density of the photo is low. I realize you can't go back in time and have another photo taken, but sharpening the image up, brightening it a bit and increasing the contrast can all easily be done by non-designers in picnik.com - which conveniently integrates with flickr and other services. I played with it a bit today - I'll email the altered photo and you can decide if you think it's more visually pleasing.
I feel like I'm nitpicking, though - all in all it's excellent.
On another topic, while listening to Heather Armstrong today I realized that as a blog participant I weigh each comment I make and decide ahead of time if I can say what I have to say without being attached to any given outcome - i.e. receiving a personal response, winning a competition, etc. If the answer is no, I don't make the comment. I think that's just good emotional hygiene. While it's in no way shape or form a blogger's responsibility to educate their audience in emotional maturity, I do think they can be pro-active about setting realistic expectations for their community. For instance, rather than being guilted into responding to someone after their 10th email, or having to create a boundary after it's already been breached - why not very clearly state your intentions of how far you want to engage your audience in the first place, as specifically as possible. Idealistic perhaps, but seems like it could save a lot of headaches and misunderstanding for everyone involved.
Hope to see you again before Wednesday.
Just want to let you know I posted a comment regarding links opening up in a different tab on your previous post "24 hours with Tim Ferriss..."
Also, i noticed that the time stamp was 4:51am but it was actually 2:51am when I submitted the comment. Is it 2 hrs. off for a reason? Let me see if it does it again after I submit this one...
Having the rotating photos on the header is a neat idea, but it seems some of them have a lower quality than others (the one you you dancing has some noise)
Like the a lot the Twitter badge! Is it the official HTML twitter badge with a custom CSS or a custom badge using twitter's API?
Overall I would say it's definitely a change for the better!
I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
Also I saw a creepy header photo where it looked like you were taking a crap in the woods. LOL
LOVE the book and blog ;-)
I'd also personally change the nav (style.css, line 29) to have the following css properties:
border: 1px solid #999999;
padding-right: 10px;
width: 888px;
This would however mean you'd need to use a new image for nav_hover_bg2.png. Fortunately, I've mocked up the one you'd need to preserve the look and feel of the current one at www.crossdrivenlife.com/nav_hover_bg2.png
Hope you like the end result. It's just a little neater and tidier.
Tim
Just started reading your blog....infact, I do not even remember how I ended up here! I've been looking a some blogs about financial stuff, fitness and success.....you discuss all 3! Keep up the good work!
Ray
It would be really really helpful !
Thank you in advance,
Carole Jackson
Building Solutions, Inc.
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Hi Carole,
I suggest you give www.simulscribe.com a shot. Check it out :)
Tim