SmarterFitter Blog Less diet, more brain

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We seem to be mostly cut over now, some people’s domain name servers might take a little longer but most hits are now on the new server.

Faster? Broken? Slower?

Please let us know if you notice anything anything broken or, for that matter, anything that is better.

The new server is in a data centre in Dallas rather than in a living room in London so we’re hoping that it will be much better for the majority of our readership over in the US.

Thanks,

-Tim

Hi,

If you’ve got a great link, post, article, image, or whatever that’s interesting, about health and fitness and you think the SmarterFitter community would like to hear about it, we’re now taking link suggestions.

Pop over to our form and post your suggestion. We’ll start posting editorially appropriate suggestions as they come in.

Be sure to include your own URL so we can credit you and link back.

There’s a link over in the right hand side bar at the top.

Thanks!

-Tim and Monica

Link

We’re going to be offline Sunday morning from 9am GMT for a couple of hours. The blog should still be available but other parts of the site will be down.

Thanks for your patience.

Hi,

The best way to keep up with the SmarterFitter blog is to subscribe to our news feed in a news reader like Google Reader. If you don’t know what a news reader is, and that’s perfectly reasonable because most people don’t, then you might like to check out this short video that explains what a reader is and why you might like to use one. Basically a news reader brings all your favourite sites including SmarterFitter to you so you don’t have to go to each site.

Link to RSS in Plain English video.

If you can’t be bothered with a reader and just like working from email, well, you can do that too. We’ve added a link on the blog page that will let you subscribe to our blog. You’ll get one daily email with all our updates and if we don’t post you wont get an email.

When you fill in the email registration form you’ll get an email that ask that you confirm your registration, click the link and the after that it is all set up.

Thanks for your time.

-Tim

Monica and I spent yesterday and this morning messing about with CSS and Wordpress. The blog is the first part of the site we’ve moved over to a new unified look with unified navigation.

I’m working on a big enhancement to the Food Diary and once that’s ready to go we’ll convert the rest of the site to the new unified look and feel too.

What do you think?

Monica and I aren’t graphic designers but we’re pretty happy with the results of a couple of evenings playing about with different colours and looks for the site along with a tab based menu.

Expect this applied to the site in the next couple of weeks.

Inspiration drawn from Skype and 37 Signals.

I have just updated the chain to cope with the impending arrival of October.

You’ll now get a clean page showing the current month with  nice overview of your entire chain below. All links should still work.

Please enjoy.

So, I’m just finishing up the look and feel on the new version of the chain. You’ll be able to move forward and back through time as well as see all of your chain in one neat view that will give you a great overview of how well you’re doing establishing your new habit or achieving your goal.

I can’t wait to release it.

More soooooon.

-Tim

Since getting back from our trips cycling in France and then walking in Scotland I’ve been using the Chain to pick up a few daily habits.

Here are my current chains.

The annoying but essential: Floss and Electric Brush Every Day

The educational: Read Agile Web Development with Rails

The mind numbing: Read An Essay About Software

And the somewhat more challenging: Run

This is what we call, in the software business, Eating Your Own Dogfood and it has been enlightening and good for me too.

Tonight Monica and I are going to sit down and design the next version of the chain so I can get it released in time for the end of September when the chain as we know it will fall off the end of the world.

We’ve built up a fairly large list of feature requests and some of those will make it in. I want to maintain the simplicity and no-registration required nature of the chain though so we’ll keep it as streamlined as possible.

More tomorrow on this topic and thanks for all the interest. I’m really keen to hear some stories from people that are using the chain everyday to build new habits or reinforce existing good habits. Send me a link to your read only chain and let me know if you mind me publishing your story here.

Thanks,
-Tim

Hi! Right now SmarterFitter.com is under heavy development as I try to get more features out for July 1st. I’ll post here as I roll out new features or find interesting general smart fitness links.