9rules - The best content from the independent web.

To save myself from repeating what I have said a million times today I am going to link you to this Note which gives direction about the future of 9rules. To sum it up, 9rules is going back to the way it used to be with noting more than Member content to fill its pages. What is old, will be new again. We will be talking about this a lot so stay tuned.

When it comes to coding up this site we have three options:

1. Do it ourselves.
2. Put a blindfold over Tyme’s eyes and four keyboards and hope that after a week of solitude she pushed out something cool.
3. Get someone else to do it.

We went with 1 and 3, but not in the way you might be thinking. The core of 9rules is powered by WordPress, bbPress and simplepie. Now you can’t get both of those packages, install them and all of a sudden have another 9rules. We customized them a ton to fit our needs, but without them as the foundation we wouldn’t be close to where we are now.

So much of the stuff that we do around here extends on the principles created by these two wonderful software packages. Too often we have visions of coding elaborate websites that do things that no one has ever seen before, but unless you are dealing with hardcore computations, most of the stuff you need has been done already in one form or another. Do enough research, a little bit of tweaking and you have your own version of whatever you want.

We never expect to have a technological advantage over anyone and in all honesty it is hard to imagine many sites having one anywhere on the web anymore. The value we bring to the many people that use 9rules will never be what we keep under the hood, but what we provide on the outside and that is where we want to maintain our advantage.

There are circumstances where putting the effort in the backend to give yourself a huge advantage pays off, but many times you just need to provide people what they want and it doesn’t matter what you use to achieve it as long as you do.

To Mike and Tyme,

We launched on Tuesday and we haven’t taken a step back since then to reflect what we did. Even worse I have not said my thanks so shame on me.

Mike, you went above and beyond what I thought you were capable of and that is being for real. Somehow you take our vision and make it visually greater than what we set out for it to be in the first place. The design is just nasty hot and you have shown that you truly are one of the best designers on the web.

Tyme it’s a shame that most of the stuff you do doesn’t get seen. Maybe if we had a Tyme ticker page it would work like the stock market and show all the activity you do behind the scenes and people would understand the importance you had to this launch. You kept our focus and gave us the time to do what we needed on the site to get it done. Props to you Black.

Without you two 9rules would only be 99% of what it is now…errr wait, I said that wrong. 9rules wouldn’t even be 1% of what is today. You two made this launch possible and that’s no bullshit. Put your drinks this weekend on the 9rules tab.

Whoever the hell pays for that don’t ask me.

Hugs and Kisses,

Scrivs

Back in 2005 I was talking with Mike and I told him this idea I had for a community of sites where site owners could get together and share resources and generally help each other out. We fleshed this idea out a bit more and over time 9rules was born. The first version of 9rules had about 20 sites in it and the Community that built up around it was very tight knit. Within our forums we had wonderful discussions on a daily basis and people were enjoying themselves. We loved it so much we thought the Community could only benefit further if we added another group of sites because that gives more people a chance to share their knowledge and resources with each other.

So we did another round of submissions. However, by this time we were also gaining a reputation of being a great place for a site to join if they wanted more exposure and because of this some of the people who were submitting weren’t concerned about the Community. They simply wanted a link to their site on 9rules so they could benefit from it. Not really that big of a problem because we all want a little more exposure for ourselves, but allowing us to show your content on our site doesn’t help out the other Members. Was the purpose of joining 9rules no longer the ability to collaborate with others that share your interests? What was the point of us creating something that wasn’t to be used?

When we opened up 9rules Notes the perception was that we forgot about our Members and that we had changed our focus. Nothing could have been further from the truth. What we created was a way for our Members to interact with the people that use to only be able to partake in 9rules from an outsider’s perspective. Besides allowing Members to interact with each other, we gave them another resource to make their online presence better. Even then to some, we were just a badge and a link on the site.

To us the 9rules leaf (no matter how damn sexy it is) will always be just a leaf. We could replace it with a butterfly, unicorn or paperclip and it would still be a symbol of what we represent and not just a placeholder to put on your site. Not only does the leaf represent quality, but it also represents the fact that 9rules is about Community. 9rules is about helping others get the best out of their online experience, but we can’t do that unless some effort is put in. Our goal was never to be the Community where you get a badge and then forget about it for the rest of your life, we let Mensa have that honor. Because of this we changed our Member Agreement to include the fact we do expect our Members to participate within 9rules because you can’t be considered a Community when no one is actually involved in it.

We didn’t make these changes to be evil. We just wanted to gain back the purpose of why we started 9rules. It is something we believe in and is part of what made us great in the first place. If you want to fault us for that we have no problem carrying that burden on our shoulders. Just don’t accuse us of losing our purpose because that purpose is what makes 9rules a great place to be.

You hear the phrase “someone needs to make a better…” or “we just created a better…” many times on the web today. Maybe someone is set on making a better Digg or a better Google. With every new version of 9rules we set out to make a better 9rules than one before. How well we succeed each iteration is up to the users, some like the new stuff, some prefer the old stuff. Either way, each version of 9rules has improvements and offers a small change in direction.

The next version of 9rules is no different. Except that Ali2 is the first 9rules that I can remember that took longer than six weeks to develop. We have been working on it since April and what is interesting about it isn’t that we needed to work night and day to code and design it, but every time we reached a finished product we took a step back and figured we could do better. So we went back to the drawing board and continued to improve upon it.

Internally we kept on setting deadlines for when we figured we would launch and every time we reached that date we weren’t satisfied with what we were left with. However, each internal launch date we could have made the site live and it would have been better than the current site you see now, but that wasn’t good enough for us. I can’t say what the difference is with this version versus prior ones, but our mentality has seemed to change with it. There is a drive behind Ali2 that wasn’t present with previous editions of 9rules.

We have literally tweaked the design and how things work 5-10x over and after the 10th time looked at it to see if we were happy. It wasn’t about being satisfied with what we did, but we wanted to be happy and satisfied. If one of us didn’t like something about a page we made sure to let the others know about it and we tried to fine tune it. Doing this across three different states wasn’t always easy, but we got it done and next week we can’t wait to show the world what we have worked so hard on.

Ali2 launches on October 9th so be sure to pull up a chair because we are making a better everything.