We are currently launching the new blog design and functionality – please play around. If anything looks off or isn’t working, let us know! Still working on getting everything running smoothly.
Postscript: A few questions:
1. LOL… some of you have said that one of the header photos is creepy. Which one? Just refresh and they should rotate. I’m assuming from the “too dark” comments that it’s the sunset from Panama — will yank that soon 🙂
2. Are the top photos rotating for everyone? Hit refresh and they should. Refresh a few times, as they might repeat here and there since it’s randomized.
3. Other bugs? Comments working for all?
The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than one billion downloads. It has been selected for "Best of Apple Podcasts" three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it's been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.
Comment Rules: Remember what Fonzie was like? Cool. That’s how we’re gonna be — cool. Critical is fine, but if you’re rude, we’ll delete your stuff. Please do not put your URL in the comment text and please use your PERSONAL name or initials and not your business name, as the latter comes off like spam. Have fun and thanks for adding to the conversation! (Thanks to Brian Oberkirch for the inspiration.)
Heya !
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!!
Testing Comments
I like it 🙂
I like it too! 😉
Why redesign the blog? Last design was just fi—ooooh pretty o_o
This looks really nice. I dig the “Most Popular” control.
I am really loving the RSS button in the center. What a fantastic way to tie the whole layout together. Great work! You should be proud.
Testing again
You are mixing bright with dark. The comment box is bright white , the links are electric blue and the light gray is going to strain my eyes.
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 really like that your comment is highlighted in green. Fantastic. Site looks great now. Just the sides are black. Oh and the top picture changes, does it rotate. I like that.
I shouldn’t have doubted you. Great job. Looks good.
Submitting a test as well – I’ll have to look at it more closely later. I do miss the picture of *you* at the top 🙂 !
~Marcie
I prefer the old design
Like the new design Tim! I dig the rotating images at the top header as well. Nice work.
I’m testing the comments too, except if this test fails, I can’t do anything about it because I’m just a reader.
Like the new design. I’m stealing the RSS button idea for my site.
While I thought the old design was just fine, I think this one is pretty sharp. The only thing I miss from the old one is the photo of you on a beach somewhere, instead of this new one in a jungle.
I would just like to say thank you. I have learned a lot.
Jimmy
Dallas, TX
the most popular all time links are broken.
Tim –
Who did you outsource the design too? Can you email me their url and/or contact info?
Thx!
###
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
I like everything but that too-dark picture in the banner. It looks too much like a snapshot misplaced on a nicely designed page.
Hi All,
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
I’m loving the new design … you have successfully blended sexiness with lime green – which most of the world before seeing this site would probably have thought impossible. Looking forward to partying with you this weekend at SXSW!
###
Same here, Rohit! Party on! Thanks for the kind words, as you are Jedi and I am a mere padawan 🙂
Tim
new design is light but dark. authoritative, but fresh
Did I say I liked it? I thought I posted that? Oh well.. I like it Tim.
The bright green isn’t my thing but it is cheerful and reminds me of money 😛
Very much agree with the previous posters. Overall, excellent, but that photo is killing me. Much preferred the old “iceberg” photo or whatever it was. This one seems a little arrogant or weird or something.
###
I’m dying of curiosity! Which one? See my comment about this below…
Tim
Wow! I really liked the old design, and was kinda peeking out of one eye when I clicked through, but this is waaaaay better. Super readable. Nicely done!
I have to concur with the posters who mentioned your picture at the top. I don’t mind the re-design, but IMHO the picture is too dark, even a little creepy. Smile, dammit! 🙂
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/green.jpg
###
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
Nice to see you updating things. I would like to let you know in the UK I have been unable to find your book for sale.
Where can I order it online?
Thanks.
###
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
How is media temple working out with you guys?
Nice job, Tim! Hope you’re having fun at SXSW. My only recommendation, as someone who does a fair amount of tech writing, is to change the search default text from “Type and hit enter to search” to “Type and press enter to search”
Cheers.
LOL… some of you have said that one of the header photos is creepy.
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
Follow-up: When I first logged in, the “creepy” photo that immediately came up was a photo of you in a white shirt, tree in the background, and you seemed to have a bit of a scowl, as if you had just taken a mouthful of my mother’s overcooked brussel sprouts. (Trust me on this, they’re enough to gag a buzzard. Even maggots go, “Oh, I don’t THINK so..!”) It didn’t rotate after a few refreshes, but it could have been simply the way that my computer had cached the page.
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.
Tim,
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.
Tim, the creepy photo is the one of you standing next to the tree in the sunset. Looks like
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
Also “the book” link seems to refresh to the same page.
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?
Nice…
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. 🙂
p.s. Chris Pearson at Pearsonified has a great tutorial on rotating images… and they don’t get caught in the cache like many of us seem to have happening for us.
Hey Tim,
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…
The new site looks awesome. There seems to be a few issues. I’m using Firefox 3. It be easier if I just include a link to a photo so you can see what is happening. Also the author first name and last name are displayed on separate line (nothing actually wrong with it though).
I really perfer the new design!
photo
Hey Tim, It was great meeting you yesterday…glad to see that you got the new design up. I looks great. Also, thanks for the tip on AskSunday.com, so far it seems like a great service, I’ll let you know how it works out.
Hope to see you around Austin..
Cheers.
I don’t like how you cannot see photos when you choose to look at individual topics anymore.
Your posts also do not come up green in the comments of those old topics.
###
Hi Jeremy,
Can you please explain? I’m not sure what you mean for the photos…
Thanks!
Tim
I’d like to second the too-dark / “Experiments in Zombie Lifestyle Living” photo comments. Not sure about the black borders, has less of a friendly web 2.0 vibe and more of a “check out my rad MySpace” page feel. I’m planning to ditch my too-dark layout.
Plus, what’s up with the grainy quality of the header photos? They look like they’re over-compressed – too much grain. Cheap looking, not as crisp and punchy as the previous header image.
The new layout seems quite tastey. Everything seems to work as it should. Nicely done.
I like the picture of you and the sunset! It’s muy sexy. For me and my Mac and Firefox the pictures haven’t rotated as of yet but that is fine by me 😉 But for your other readers they may want variety.
Congrats on the redesign! Change is fun!
Jen
Site looks really good. Nice work!
About the photos:
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
What I like it the most is that you highlight your own comments. I used to have hard time to find out what you replied to the comments. Such as good idea and important minor detail.
BTW, sorry didn’t get to watch the funny video at ETech. Could post it here?
As a staff blogger at ProBlogger.net, I’ve seen a lot of over-used WordPress themes, and I must argue that this looks like one of them (at least a few elements are re-cycled from the design of ProBlogger).
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.
###
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 http://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
Yup, the photos are rotating. Fun to see a different experience reflected in each photo!
Love the blog. Love the book.
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
Hi,
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
###
Thank you, Kelly! I really wish you all the best… 🙂
Tim
Re: the photo’s in the header – I like the one where it looks like you’re taking a country crap. (sorry for the low brow humor)
I hope (and would imagine) you made these changes mostly to make things easier for you 🙂 As for your designer, maybe he has a muse there – a good wordpress designer has to be gold. Perhaps he could take the business and outsource it!
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
Tim, I think the redesign looks great. I like the color scheme and pattern. It visually flows better and seems less cluttered. I was never a big fan of the last design. Photos are great, although I think you should add more, or just have a section of photos from your trips and adventures. – Evan
Disregard my comment about the photos. They look great.
[…] are still ironing out any bugs and browser issues that people point out, so let us know if you see anything that is way off or […]
@ 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, 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 http://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
I like this redesign, but I liked the old design more. I feel that it was more “catchy” and streamlined. I don’t want to pick this one apart though because I think your designer did a good job in general and I dislike critiquing other designers’ work just to find something wrong. I do like the fact that you kept the general look and colors of the old one too.
Hey,
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!
Hey!
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
One more thing: for some reason, the last 63 pixels of the logo (“The BLOG of Tim Ferriss”) isn’t clickable.
Marius
The pics rotate but they are too dark and greyish and resizing seems to have been done by a layman with cheap software. You need a Photoshop wiz to make the most of your original image files!
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 don’t usually take the time to comment, but I just wanted to agree with Jennifer above that the sunset photo is great, easily one of the best 2-3 Tim Ferriss photos that I’ve seen.
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.
###
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
I like it.
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.
Looks good!
Tim,
I don’t know if it’s related to the re-design, but the post at:
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/09/14/the-top-5-reasons-to-be-a-jack-of-all-trades/
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!
With graphics switched off (greetings from the slow lane of the mobile internet!), the post body is dark grey text on a black background, which is very hard to read.
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/redesign-launching/ | 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
The sunset/white shirt pic looks cool, may want to brighten it a bit.
Come out to the Purevolume party at 2nd and trinity tonight!
###
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
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
Looking good.
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!
when i press ‘tims faves’ in the right hand menu
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.
The photo with the tree in the background with you in white shirt looking down on us…a little creepy. For those that have been here I don’t think it matters, but new people might give it some notice as they are judging the site for the first time.
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
Looks good Tim.
Good stuff Tim definitely more towards the current web paradigm, good information and a nice consistent user interface.
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.
Tim, great to meet you at SXSW!
Loved the old blog. Love the book.
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 😉
Hi Tim,
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
Excellent design Tim, looking really sharp. Love the changes.
THAT was the creepy one? I liked it. Stephanie’s hypothesis is ringing true. If the girls want it back, do we have a shot?
###
Hmmm… you’re making me think twice, that’s for sure! To be determined…
Tim
I like the design a lot.
Right now the only major issue I see is:
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/wp-content/themes/timferriss_bb/images/random/header_3.jpg
It seems to be a dead image which destroys the layout until you refresh the page.
Tim, just became aware of 4HWW concept last week. checking out ya website now.. yes im a bit slow on the uptake i know… guess i was away on a looooong vacation… ha, not likely! no, actually working hard and thus not much time to myself to think about these things & the short but precious life we have… anyway – to the point… living in Japan a number of years now… great place… i know you spend alot of time here too… I noticed on your site a reference to “death by overwork”… typo… karoosh -> should be ??? KAROSHI…
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
follow-up to previous email… in my comments i pasted in some “kanji” (japanese text) for karoshi… however I since noticed that you can’t paste “kanji” characters into this “submit comment” box… it just comes out as ??? … Tim, as you know… “moji-bake”… ai
Hey Tim,
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
Hi! i have a request. Can you tell us ur opinion about jealousy and how to deal with it? i’m sure you would help out a lot of people. Thanks
I’ve got an idea… Hire a photographer from India to travel with you and take PR shots for your blog. Make sure you clearly articulate that you want the emphasis on sexy but not too aggressive that you scare away other men.
The photographer should most assuredly be from Goa.
Josh
Hi Tim,
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.
Tim,
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…
Yup
Outsource motherhood – http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/world/asia/10surrogate.html?ex=1205812800&en=039d69f82d16a30c&ei=5070&emc=eta1
The design is very clean and simple and, like someone already mentioned, the RSS logo in the middle rocks! The design has lots of information available without being too cluttered, although I would prefer something like a tag cloud where the topic list is.
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!
Well…your pictures look very poorly photoshopped.
I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
New design looks great. Is it a new template or is it new blogging software in general ? If so what template or software is it ?
Also I saw a creepy header photo where it looked like you were taking a crap in the woods. LOL
Wish there was an easy way to print comments — just your post prints out at the moment, the comments disappear.
LOVE the book and blog 😉
If you want the drop down menu bits to look better, change the top value in the css file to 361px (style.css, line 136).
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 http://www.crossdrivenlife.com/nav_hover_bg2.png
Hope you like the end result. It’s just a little neater and tidier.
Thanks, Pete! I’ll talk with my designer and check out what you suggested 🙂
Tim
Hey 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
Tim, if you read this. I would really like you to add a “print this” option for a printer friendly output. Many of these articles are a take home one or a recommend to others when they spend sometime at home (without the internet, yes that’s common here in India).
It would be really really helpful !
I love your book! I am 52 years old and restructuring the two businesses that I run in your model. Question – my problem is not e-mail overload, but cell phone and telephone calls overload. When I answer the calls real time I get distracted from bigger projects and end up dealing with problem solutions and quick fixes all day. When I do not answer the phone I get complaints or emergencies that I should have taken care of. What can you suggest? I love the automatic notice re:email that one is checking only twice a day, but how can this be applied to telephone calls?
Thank you in advance,
Carole Jackson
Building Solutions, Inc.
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Hi Carole,
I suggest you give http://www.simulscribe.com a shot. Check it out 🙂
Tim