Recent Blog Entries
9rules: Vol. 3, Edition 1
Written by Scrivs on April 30, 2008
In February I announced that the old 9rules was coming back. That was a lie. The old 9rules was never coming back, just some of the philosophy behind it. We are constantly trying to improve and move forward and saying the old version of anything is coming back seemed like a step backwards for us. So today we are happy to show you what we like to refer to as the 3rd Volume of 9rules, a new beginning with some old time goodness mixed in.
Members, Members, Members
There is really only one thing you need to keep in mind with Volume 3 and that is it features nothing but 9rules Member content. Every piece of content that you come across in every community is from one of our Members. The goal of 9rules is to present some of the best content from around the independent web to people who enjoy that kind of thing.
Customization
With so much wonderful content appearing before your screen we understand that not everything might pique your interests so we have allowed a bit of customization with regards to what content you see. With your my.9rules or Chawlk account you can now select your favorite communities and Members and your homepage will display content only from those communities while your favorites page displays just the content from your favorite members. We hope that this allows you to experience 9rules the way you want to experience it.
Round 6
Obviously 9rules wouldn’t be anything without our Members and we are always on the look out for more wonderful sites to share with the world. On May 7th we will be holding Round 6 for submissions into 9rules and we hope that you take the time to apply if you feel you have something to offer our audience. The round is only 24 hours and make sure to keep an eye on the blog for updates on when and where to submit your site.
New Members
We have never been ones to judge our members on the size of their readership because quality of content has no regards for how many people are reading it. With this in mind I thought it would be nice to extend an invitation to a couple of sites that I respected and who’s content I have been following for a while to see if they would want to join 9rules. Here are some of the new members, you might have heard of a couple if not all of them. We welcome them all.
We have more coming up, but these made it in time for our launch.
Chawlk
We started to build Chawlk immediately when we realized the changes we were going to make with 9rules. It incorporates all of the my.9r functionality that so many people have enjoyed and repackages it into a shiny new box. However, we aren’t done with it yet. Our goal was never to break out into just two sites because that doesn’t solve all the problems that we have encountered so keep an eye out as we have more surprises coming in the next 2-4 weeks. For now though don’t hesitate to join in on the great discussions that can be found at Chawlk AlphaBetaGammaZeta.
Thanks
9rules launched 3 years ago this week. We have had many ups and downs and have made more connections with wonderful people than we could ever imagine. We would not be here without the help of many people and for that we wish to thank them.
- To every member that has passed through us (not in a bowel movement kind of way) we thank you. It doesn’t matter if you are still with us because each of you have given us an experience that we have learned from and we can only hope for many more experiences from you in the future. You guys always have our backs and know how to pick us up when things aren’t looking too great. We would have no problem crashing at your place when our landlords kick us out for not making huge barrels of money off of you.
- Our audience. I have no clue what to refer to you people, but you are more than fans. It is amazing the interest you show in 9rules and when we start to think that nobody cares about us, you come along and ask when the new stuff is going to hit. You say crazy shit like “GIVE ME A PREVIEW OR I WILL JUMP OFF MY BOTTOM STEP” and we love you for it. Thank you.
- To the haters. As much as we love our Members and Audience I have to give out a thanks to all the haters, doubters and people who just for some reason or another wish for our downfall. You probably provide us with the most inspiration to push on and try new things. Without you telling us that we matter to nobody, that we should give up or that our glory days have passed us by we wouldn’t do things the way with do with such a killer attitude. Bless you.
We hope you enjoy Volume 3.
April 30th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
I love the new design. Very clean and well organized….well done people. Congrats.
April 30th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
100% improvement guys! I love it. Kudos to you Mike on the great design – yet again
April 30th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Looks nice–I look forward to poking around some cool sites again.
April 30th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Congratulations on the new design guys! Reminds me of the old school 9rules!
April 30th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Awesome work guys. Comments still need some CSS, and I love the 404 error page! Some CSS issues in Camino (but who pays attention to that browser, right?) Smart move by 9rules. Keep up the great work, and don’t forget to feature yourselves more, oh mighty rulers.
April 30th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Thanks everyone. We’re still doing some tweaking. Thanks for the heads up on Camino David.
April 30th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Old meets new, baby! Love the freshness and simplicity. You rocked it. (Oh, and no problems with Camino here.)
April 30th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Well done guys. New look 9rules rocks!
April 30th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
This totally made my day. I’m super excited about it and it looks amazing.
April 30th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Fan-freakin-tastic! Now *this* is the 9rules I know and love. Great job Mike, Scrivs and my boo Tyme.
April 30th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Great stuff guys. I love the new design, love the return to old form in a sense. I’m very excited to see 9rules blossom further.
April 30th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Hey guys -
Everything looks great. Keep up the great work.
-Mattie
April 30th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
[...] Question brought to you by Volume 3. [...]
April 30th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Thanks everyone.
April 30th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Well done guys, brought back memories of the first 9rules version. It has been three years
already…Looking forward to the thrill of writing a post and seeing it on the frontpage of 9rules!
April 30th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Looks really great guys! It’s awesome.
April 30th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Simple, tidy and resists the current trend of cramming every possible design element and ‘gadget’ into the layout.
my.9r is finally much easier to navigate and ‘understand’ from a UI standpoint. Well done. Here’s hoping the next rounds and treatment of folks matches the new look.
April 30th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Woot to the new site and a warm welcome to the new members. I’ve had my head down working all week and just had to surface to check the new site out and love what I’m seeing.
April 30th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Good job to all — I’m enjoying the simplified approach already.
April 30th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
[...] a heads up, 9rules, the most awesome blogging network in the universe, relaunched today. The forum discussions have been removed from the site, returning 9rules to the original idea; [...]
April 30th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Great release! I love the new accepted websites.
April 30th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Hello new 9rules!
How I’m awed by you so.
Let’s look forward to some great times ahead.
Because how can we not give that a go?
April 30th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
This is definitely my most favorite design that 9rules has had. It’s so clean and simple. I really love the AJAXy goodness on the community button up top. Brilliant addition.
April 30th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
One thing, though…I do think there should be a “view all members” link in the communities dropdown. I only discovered that on the homepage, and it’s quite the handy set of pages if you’re interested in just visiting sites in any community.
April 30th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
I love the new site design! It’s so fresh and so clean clean…
April 30th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
[...] The 9rules Blogging Community Relaunches In February I announced that the old 9rules was coming back. That was a lie. The old 9rules was never coming back, just some of the philosophy behind it. – 9rules: Vol. 3, Edition 1 [...]
April 30th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Hey Lelia, you mean have a link to the community members page for a community, right next to its link in the dropdown?
May 1st, 2008 at 12:11 am
I mean, when the dropdown opens up to show the communities, I think it’d be good to have another link included (maybe with a different color/chunk of a background) that said “View all member sites.” Presently, it looks like you can only view all members if you click the link that says that on the homepage. I don’t know–to me it seems like when giving people a choice of all sorts of communities, they should also be given an obvious choice to just see all the members, from any page, not just the homepage.
That’s really a nitpicky thing, though. I adore this design!
May 1st, 2008 at 3:55 am
*gushes and salivates over shiny parallax scrolling header effect*
May 1st, 2008 at 6:35 am
[...] excellent 9rules blogging network relaunched today, opting to shift focus back to where it belonged all along: the content. All the superfluous [...]
May 1st, 2008 at 7:40 am
@Lelia – actually there is sidebar content missing on some pages (not sure why) but random member content will be on those pages and a link to viewing member content would be there. I prefer this better because the link to members is visible whether the person clicks on the browse button or not. Yesterday was “code is going to be overwritten” day. *shrugs
Thanks for the comments everyone. Eli – got an email coming your way. Watch out for it.
May 1st, 2008 at 7:50 am
[...] saw the launch of the new 9rules. The post announcing it’s launch on the 9rules blog – 9rules vol 3 edition 1 – shows the focus has moved back onto members content and the design reflects this. There is really [...]
May 1st, 2008 at 9:58 am
[...] cake and eat it too?
The 9 Rules guys have graciously invited me into the club, and have also relaunched their network to become more like LifeRemix, ironically. Other LifeRemix blogs that have recently joined [...]
May 1st, 2008 at 10:23 am
Its great to see you ‘back’. Wishing you great success with your new ‘start’.
May 1st, 2008 at 11:43 am
[...] amazing 9rules network has relaunched and Volume 3 seems more promising then ever with “a new beginning with some old time goodness mixed [...]
May 1st, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Great work all around. This header is great. Design and functionality. I admire your fortitude, determination, and skill at achieving your goals.
Congratulations.
At some point I’d like to see the front page use the thumbnails of the sites again as a visual identifier in the “Fresh From Our Member Blogs” section.
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:35 am
[...] new version of 9rules have launched, labeled Volume 3 edition 1 in the launch post by Paul Scrivens. As usual, Mike Rundle have done a nice job designing the site, clean and sober [...]
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:55 pm
I’m super excited to be part of the 9rules family. I first applied to be a member in 9rules Round 5. That was in 2006, so patience does pay off! Thanks everyone for the warm welcome.
May 5th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Meh.
I think the header is pretty cool. I am on Windows XP Pro, and the font on the homepage looks horrible…probably because its defaulting to Tahoma since I don’t have Helvetica.
I feel like design wise, this version takes a huge leap backwards. I loved what Mike did withe last few versions, but this one isn’t screaming out to me to love it.
The font thing is just killing me
maybe the answer is I have to go buy a mac.
I think the site is good, just a step back in my opinion…though I think the philosophy going back more toward the roots behind 9rules is great. Maybe my site will get back in when submission time comes.
May 7th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
This post is now an old posting (April) but did my comment get removed that I posted I think on Monday? I didn’t think it was a negative comment, just being honest from my personal perspective.
Thanks
May 7th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
@Bryan – I found it in Akismet and posted it. Sorry about that.
May 7th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Hey Bryan thanks for the tip about Windows and not having Helvetica, I’ll make the second font choice Arial just to cover my bases.
May 10th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
The new 9 rules looks stunning.. and love the community dropdown selector, awesome stuff.
May 27th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Love the new design, what a fresh breath. Now that Plesk favicon has got to go!
May 29th, 2008 at 3:48 am
[...] adding to 9rules to the point where 9rules wasn’t even 9rules anymore. Then last month we relaunched 9rules and the division between it and Chawlk was complete. What’s funny is that the idea for Chawlk [...]
June 14th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
I hope v3 works out excellently for you. I’m loving the lighter appearance (always prefer light over dark).
Best of luck.
September 4th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Hi all,
I’m new here. I write action-adventures & mysteries especially for tween boys. My blog, Books for Boys, consistently ranks in the top 10 on Google.
Max
September 19th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
9rules was coming back is a funny jokes but new looks is looking great
November 6th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
very nice
November 18th, 2008 at 6:29 am
i´m still asking myself: what-the hell!- are your 9 rules?
dirk&carmen
November 28th, 2008 at 3:14 am
Looking forward to join.
December 2nd, 2008 at 7:44 am
I’m loving the new design. Very easy on the eyes. Hope to find more cool resources.
January 13th, 2009 at 9:40 am
You have to change the footer copyright date to 2009, happy new year! // J
September 8th, 2009 at 5:18 am
First time visit.. I am writing about mankind… About all of us who come from the same root.. but now all of us are separated.. By boundaries.. By natures.. By skins.. By religions.. By gods.. If i have a power.. i wish to speak to all mankind to bring all of us together again, respect each other, love each other.. because we are families.. from the same root..
September 11th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
I love the layout. I just joined. Thanks!
September 21st, 2009 at 12:25 pm
I just joined and I’m loving it!
October 8th, 2009 at 11:40 am
I heard about 9rules from a friend and wanted to check it out. I read about submitting a site on may 7, when is the next time to submit a site and how do i do it?
October 20th, 2009 at 5:39 am
Design is still relevant:)
November 15th, 2009 at 5:50 am
It’s really great to see 9rules back again. Looking forward to it…
Regards,
Shalin
November 23rd, 2009 at 11:07 am
[...] * The biggest news for our network recently was the acquisition of 9rules. We have previously announced the Round 9 winners and Andy Merrett is doing a great job over their with his weekly series “Around 9rules“. A new round of memberships is planned for the New Year. This was a very proud and momentous step for us to take and we are committed to doing justice to the legacy of 9rules. [...]