I just launched a completely overhauled website design. It was time for a redesign. The old design had become a mess to maintain, and was hard to navigate. The new design takes into account that the site has grown substantially since I launched it earlier this year. If you find any broken links, errors, not so great looking items, please post a comment so that I can fix them!

So what’s new? The new navigation bar directly under the page title gives you direct access to the main components of the site:

• Home: The new main page does not count my blog posts in full anymore. Instead, I only show excerpts of each blog post. This should make the page faster to load and easier to take in. On the left hand side, you can quickly get to my most popular blog posts and subscribe to my blog.
• Blog: My blog is the most popular item on my page. The new design features better blog navigation via the left bar.
• Forums: The second interactive component of my page are my forums. When you click on the forums link, you’ll be sent to the same forums page as before. Integrating the new design into the forums will happen in the near future.
• Office 2007: The most changes happened in the Office 2007 section. Navigating the Office 2007 section should now be vastly improved, and I hope the new organization of the content will make this section popular.
• Customize: Customizing Office 2007’s Ribbon User Interface is the primary topic of my site. The Customize section will give you an overview as to how and what can be customized.
• RibbonX:My site now features a RibbonX Portal! I would like to make this the top location to go to for everything RibbonX. If you have any content that you would like to have integrated/linked to from my RibbonX Portal, please post it in the RibbonX Portal forum. Over the next few weeks, I’ll add a lot of content of my own to it.
• OneNote: As a OneNote MVP, I need a section dedicated to OneNote. Content-wise, nothing is really different there. I don’t expect to add much to it in the coming weeks, as I will be focusing on my RibbonCustomizer add-in and the RibbonX Portal.
• Eng. 1: If you are a student in my Engineering 1 class, this is where you should go.
• Research: A quick overview of my published papers. When I have time, I’ll update it with more content.

In addition to all of this, my site now has a Google search box on almost every page. So if you are looking for something on my page, but are not sure where it is, give the search box a try.

Go check out my new site and post your comments about it!

The saga of the Office UI Bible continues (read part 3).

The blog “Life On The Wicked Stage: Act 2” by TabletPC MVP Warner Crocker gave me a “2006 Life On the Wicked Stage Inkblot Award” for “Best I Love Jensen Harris’s Blogging But I Just Have To Create A Table Of Contents So I Can Find What I Want”. Warner is one of the TabletPC MVPs behind GottaBeMobile.com.

It seems that my Office UI Bible post is very popular. First, Ed Bott blogged about it. Then Jensen Harris adopted my categorization of his blog as his official index. The post has until today been hit 3,390 times according to my website statistics, making it my second most popular blog post (the most popular blog post is my B2TR issues one with 12,725 hits). Add to those hits 879 views via RSS.

Today though, I got my by biggest surprise about the popularity of this post, when I got my mail. In the mail was the latest issue of eWeek (November 27, 2006. Vol. 23, No. 47). The cover, as you can see below (the black spot is where my address had been printed), announced prominently an Office 2007 review.

I went ahead and read it, and then came upon the first column about it: Jim Rapoza’s column titled “Office 2007 - nothing new” on page 46, which is interestingly titled “Office 2007 - Something New” in its web edition. If you are interested in the column, but can’t read it in the scan below, just read the online version.

I read the column, and then there was this box with WWWeb Resources. Take a look at the box for yourself:

I couldn’t believe my eyes. There, in a printed computer magazine, was a link to a blog post of mine! And better yet, it was listed before the link to the Office test drive!

That definitely made my day! Jim, thank you very much for that link.

P.S.: This blog has been quiet on the RibbonX front for a while. The reason is that I have been gearing up for the launch of my RibbonCustomizer add-in. I am happy to announce that its launch will be on Thursday coinciding with the Office 2007 launch. The Professional version will be available then for $29.99.

I have added forums to my website. Do you have a question about RibbonX? Pop into my forums and ask it.

The main purpose of my forums is to support the upcoming release of RibbonCustomizer. If you have a particular feature request, post it in the forums.

Now go to my forums and be the first one to post!

For other Office 2007 questions, please use the appropriate Microsoft community newsgroup.

As diagnosed correctly by FeedBurner, the problem of Outlook 2007 not being counted in the RSS subscription statistics lays with Outlook. Michael Affronti, the Outlook Program Manager responsible for the RSS feature, just announced that Outlook 2007 doesn’t and won’t report a custom user-agent string. That means, any service, not just FeedBurner, trying to interpret the data will only see requests from IE7 that look like someone is browsing a feed. Without a custom user-agent string, there is simply no way to differentiate real IE7 feed browsing from an Outlook 2007 feed subscription.

This is extremely unfortunate and with Outlook 2007 probably going to be adopted widely, means that RSS feed subscription statistics will be significantly lower than their real number. How much lower? I can only guess.

FeedBurner reported that I had 148 subscribers and 2445 hits from IE7 on Monday. It seems to me most likely that the majority of those IE7 hits are generated by Outlook 2007. After all, most people would not browse to my RSS feed, but rather browse to my website. Let’s be conservative though and assume that only 80% of the hits (=1956) are generated by Outlook 2007. I don’t know how often Outlook pulls my feed, but once every hour sounds reasonable. If I am very conservative again, I assume that a copy of Outlook pulling my feed is running 24 hrs. In that case, the 1956 hits represent 81.5 subscribers. Looking at my weekend drop though, I would say it is reasonable to assume that most people read my blog at work or at least during office hours. So maybe they don’t have Outlook running 24 hrs, but just 16 hrs. That would represent 122.25 subscribers.

I get to pick then between my total subscription number being 229 or 270 instead of the reported 148.