HPMoR.com
Josh’s mirror of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has been redesigned by Lightwave (who also did IntelligenceExplosion.com, Friendly-AI.com, and lukeprog.com), and it is now located at a simpler URL: HPMoR.com. Thanks also to Louie who put together this “facelift” project.
The font is too big by default. It’s a standard function of browsers to change the font, I think by default a site should conform to normal expectations.
There’s some clutter in the RSS feed, though the last entries are fine.
What kind of clutter are you seeing in the RSS feed? It looks fine and validates to me, but if there’s something else I should be doing, it’s easy to modify.
It turns out to be a bit more complicated. The feed explicitly linked from the front page doesn’t have clutter, but its links point to [1] etc. instead of [2] etc., which doesn’t seem right.
On the other hand, if you enter the page URL in Google Reader, it somehow associated with it the feed located at [3], which had the clutter in question in the past, doesn’t anymore, but Google Reader remembers… I’m guessing there must be some standard suffix starting from an URL that specifies a feed-by-default, which is checked first by a feed reader when it’s given a non-feed URL, and it’s absent for the front page; I’d guess it should be [4].
Edit: URLs don’t format well in comments, so some are included in form of links.
Ah, I see. That’s an artifact of the way I set up the hosting, with hpmor.com being a mirror of www.elsewhere.org/rationality/. RSS autodiscovery works because I added tags for it, but the rss feed itself is currently a static file written whenever the update utility runs, so it can’t know which URL a browser is requesting it as. I can fix that, though; give me 15 minutes.
To your edit: then just write
Which looks like http://hpmor.com/chapter/77.
The problem is with text justification): some lines get stretched with spaces between words that are longer than the words.
For example, http://example.com/long-url-that-cant-be-space-separated followed by another http://example.com/long-url-that-cant-be-space-separated stretches the text in an ugly fashion.
As someone who has read and enjoyed the fic, I like the cover art. Unfortunately, I think it’s probably off-putting to new readers. The biggest thing that jumps out at me is that it’s fan made, and it’s lower quality than the writing. It also doesn’t make much sense if you’ve not read the fic: Why are they wearing green? Who is in the upper left? What’s Draco holding? Why a book? Why are there stars, and is that a space probe? Why are they standing on a little earth?
I don’t have a good idea about what to replace it with, though.
I could just have it cycle through the crystal ball, wizards-in-space, and finger-snapping covers at random. I had switched to the space one because Eliezer seems to prefer it, and authors don’t often get to have much of a say about the cover art.
I wonder if there would be a reasonable metric for a/b testing?
The cover art looks amateurish to me. Quirrell’s cheek is a mess. Harry’s head can’t decide whether it’s frontal or 3⁄4. Draco’s arms look like they’re painted on the book cover. Augh, too many mistakes to list. Here’s what a good drawing looks like.
I’m not a huge fan of the wizards-in-space illustration myself, but it’s hardly fair to compare an amateurish original illustration to a technically competent copy of a movie poster. They’re different beasts entirely.
Oh whoops, I didn’t know that was a poster… Here’s some nice original fanart.
Speaking only for myself, having questions like these would raise my curiosity about the contents, not diminish it.
Nice indeed, I shall be sure to reference in next update.
Though for the cover art… http://zerinity.deviantart.com/art/Methods-of-Rationality-259116881 would be a good successor to the current crystal ball, I think.
Personally I liked the snapped fingers cover art. I get the feeling I’m in the minority though!
Cover art has been switched out, and credited in the footer. Although now the web host appears to be having network issues. I should move this to my other host.
Good cover. HP looks like Zvi
Maybe include a link to the TvTropes page?
There is a bad link at External Links --> Book-style PDF
I’ve commented out the link, because the PDF seems to have gone away and the copy of it I have only goes up to chapter 72. I’ve got email out to its creator asking if he’d like me to host it or transfer the project files so I can keep it up to date.
Here’s the chapter 77 PDF in case you want it.
Fortunately,
linkcheckertells me the MF link is the only broken link. (It does complain about spaces and newlines inside URL links, which to my surprise apparently works and only throws warnings.)I wonder if it’s a good idea to take this chance to (at least superficially) separate HPMoR from the signalling associated with fanfic-dom.
Being a good fanfic is the signalling that gave it its thousands of readers and drew dozens of us into LessWrong. I think it’s as a fanfic that it does what it’s meant to do.
HPMor is fanfiction.