9rules - The best content from the independent web.

Hi, my name is Paul Scrivens. I’m the guy who came up with this domain name and am 1/10th of the collective brain that came up with the original concept for 9rules. Although it seems like half a century ago I’m sure a couple of you remember how 9rules was when we initially launched. A small community where we all got together and discussed anything in our forums and showcased great content that truly mattered. As blogs matured and moved on we tried to move 9rules along with it. There were some successes and some failures, but we could always say that whenever we tried something new we did it with the best intentions.

Last August, we announced our sale of the site to Splashpress. I agreed to stay on for a bit with 9rules to help the Splashpress team with the transition. During this time we even had a Round, but I didn’t participate in it and admittedly most of the sites wouldn’t have gotten in under the watch of Tyme, Mike or myself.

In November, I took over the reins of Splashpress and with this came managing 9rules all over again. Now when we first handed over 9rules we felt that it was a good thing because we thought someone else with a fresh perspective could bring some added flavor to the Network. With my mini-vacation I was finally able to sit back and see where 9rules was going and much of it I didn’t like. Fortunately, now that 9rules is under the SPM umbrella there isn’t a constant struggle to ensure that we are bringing in a ton of money, which admittedly was part of what clouded my judgements with 9rules before.

9rules doesn’t have to be the world leader in blogging or be a name that is recognized by all. 9rules simply needs to be what it does best and that is a place for people who love to write to come together. To do this though requires a lot of changes and one of them you can see over time is the removal of a lot of sites that just don’t match the quality that 9rules represents. One of the best times at 9rules was when we first started with 17 sites and we might very well get back down to that number. If you are a member and you don’t see your site up anymore then you probably haven’t been following what is going on in the forums. If that is the case you shouldn’t be too concerned. You are still a member in the forums so you can continue interacting with 9rules members.

There is also going to be a new model of how 9rules works. Every piece of content written by our members isn’t frontpage worthy, we realize that. If our job is to showcase the best content then we need to create a system where only the best content shows and that is what we are working on behind the scenes. I can’t promise a return to the glory days because those are behind us, but I can ensure you that the changes that do take place are ones that bring a focus back to why you came to 9rules in the first place.

As another way of showcasing some of the great content to be found on the 9rules network, we’ll be taking a look across the network a couple of times each week, picking out some of our favourite posts on particular topics.

We kick off with everything tech.

First up, an interesting experiment by Eric at SchwarzTech, who lived off his iBook G3 while his MacBook Pro was in for repair. Take a look at his experience plus a few tips for any other Mac users planning to dig out a hardware relic.

Plenty of tutorials doing the rounds this week, including how to set up Ubuntu to synchronise its time over the Internet, tweaking the Windows 7 Taskbar, blocking someone on Facebook and adding topics to Google News.

There’s also a very definite pro-Windows 7 article that sticks it to Mac fanboys.

Jan Oda has written an interesting article about using Twitter for writing web fiction, in which she describes the myriad of useful things she’s used the microblogging service for, including contacting other fiction authors, finding poems and digital art, and then explains the basics of Twitter in a way that’s relevant to writers.

Get Elastic has written a really good feature on how website performance impacts shopper behaviour — even if your site isn’t a shopping site per se, upping performance is sure to improve visitor experience and loyalty.

Did you have a favourite post in 9rules tech world this week?

As announced, we’re opening a new round in the next few hours. We’re giving bloggers a 24 hour window to submit their sites starting midnight of October 1 2009. Stay tuned till then, and in the meantime, please tell everyone!

Exciting!

Just a quick one. We’re rebuilding the 9rules directory. The big picture is that we have bits and pieces of information about everybody scattered about the forums and in document attachments. But as we grow, we’re using the magic of Google Docs (I swear, it’s so much easier these days) to rebuild the directory (and it goes without saying that this will be held in strict confidence).

For more information, click here. For those who have already filled this up before, thank you so much!

Also, it has come to my attention that there may be some 9rules members that may not have access or have forgotten their access to the internal forums. If you belong to one of these categories, please send me an email at jayvee at splashpress dot com.

Shirts have always been great for branding. So much more for community. There’s a big sense of “belonging” when you wear the shirt of your favorite team, and the same applies to a great community. So we’re in the process of stitching shirts and we’d love to hear what you have in mind.

We’ve got a few mock ups for the 9rules community in our internal forums. Check them out under the Canopy. These designs are by all means not final and we’d love to hear your suggestions. I’ve been thinking about artistically cramming the nine rules into one shirt, so let’s see how that one goes.