No, Grey Matters' new look is not just for the blog and the video blog. The rest of the site is going to be resdesigned in accordance with the new look, as well. The Mental Gym has already been redesigned!

If you take a look at the opening Mental Gym page, you might think, “It doesn't look all that different.”

That's true, but part of the the redesign includes moving the Mental Gym back to its original address. The new Mental Gym is now located here, where it resided before my ISP removed the site, roughly 1 year ago.

Besides a new look, there's better functionality, too. In the old version, many of the feats were taught over several different pages, such as the Day of the Week For Any Date feat. Now, all the multi-page lessons have been shrunk onto one page, and the content sections have been tabbed. The new version of the Day of the Week For Any Date feat looks feels, and operates much better. It's even possible to bookmark the individual tabs, if you want to save a page to return to later.

All the original memory basics, feats and tests are still there. In some cases, there were some minor changes, such as replacement of dead links. Probably the most noticeable change to the tests would be the replacement of the old Javascript version of Sudoku with an updated Flash version. Oh, I should mentioned that the WKRP Contest Song Timed Quiz has been fixed, and is now working perfectly.

Note that the Mental Gym already has a Site Navigation section similar to the one in the rightmost column of this blog. Click any of the arrows present, and you can navigate more deeply into the Mental Gym.

The move is not only affecting the Mental Gym itself, but the site as a whole. If you go up to the drop-down menu at the top and select Mental Gym, or any of the pages in it, it no longer goes to the old freehostia site, but rather the new updated version. As I finish redesigning the other sections of the site, the old freehostia site will soon become little more than a collection of pages redirecting to the new site.

There is one last additional change I want to mention. The search engine at the upper right originally would only search the section you were in, such as just this blog or just the videos. It has now been re-written so that it searches the whole site! If you type, for example, for “Pi” into the search engine, here are the results you'll get.

Yes, the search results have been tabbed so that you can look at results from just the section you want. For example, here's all the places Pi is mentioned in the video section. As with any of the other new tabbed sections, you can bookmark individual searches and tabs. Also, note the three small icons above the results. Clicking on them will let you see 1, 4 or 8 results per page, depending on which of the three icons you click.

At this writing, you won't get many search results for anything in the Mental Gym tab, as the new location hasn't been thoroughly searched by Google yet, but you should see good Mental Gym search results before July ends.

Next up, I'll be redesigning the Presentation section, the Grey Matters Store and the iPhone/iPod Touch page, so keep your eyes open!