Some of you remember that I joined the 9Rules network a while ago. At the beginning of October, 9Rules members got an e-mail advertising a new membership agreement.

After talking it out in Clubhouse, we made participating either in the private member area or my.9rules a requirement, part of the membership agreement. This goes back to the 9rules core because that is the way it used to be except members naturally interacted with one another so a requirement was not necessary [...]

If you feel you are contributing by your entries being shown only, 9rules is no longer a good fit for you, decline the agreement (or do not respond), please remove the leaf from your site and we will remove your site from displaying on 9rules.

I was in the middle of a move at the time, and the news underwhelmed me. Clearly, I thought, I haven’t even had the time to blog very much lately, much less blog and start arbitrarily posting in a forum. So, though it seemed a shame, I ignored the e-mail and passed quietly from the 9Rules world.

When I redesigned my site, I began thinking more heavily about the little leaf I was excluding, and became a little more irritated at the whole thing. A couple of years ago, 9Rules was a “Who’s Who” of the blogging world. It highlighted the best designs and the best content. It didn’t ask for anything else. This is partly why I joined it.

And perhaps it was my generation that finally changed things. Mandatory forum posting? Really? When did 9Rules become a glorified social network? Wasn’t it all about driving users to good content?

Apparently, I’m not the only one who was peeved, as there seems to have been a mass exodus of really excellent blogs in response to the revised membership agreement.

• Broken Kode
• Chris J. Davis
• Standards for Life
• Open Switch
• h0bbel.p0ggel.org
• Wynia
• Seopher
• I-Marco
• Transformatum
• baires.elsur.org
• Dan Lockton
• h3h

9Rules is, of course, free to do as it wants. If this is the direction that it wants wants go, more power to it. But it’s a different 9Rules than the one I joined (or thought I did), and I’m feeling better every day about my decision to leave.

As I said in a previous comment, the problem with having content about a new theme is that it won’t be relevant when the theme goes away or changes. So this post is to both exhibit and archive this theme so that there is some record of it.

Hooloovoo

toggle thumbnails

It’s a different creature than I’m used to—I’ve never not had a sidebar, but I decided that perhaps a sidebar wasn’t the best way to do things. I moved that sort of ancillary data to the top, but I used a pull-down menu á la Foliage mod. Since sidebar data tends to not be particularly important to the content anyway, it doesn’t need to take up real estate.

Metadata, while displayed more or less inline on the index page, is moved down into a content footer on the individual post pages. This kind of graphical metaphor is actually very common now, but I’ve wanted to do it ever since I saw it in Hemingway about a year and a half ago. Like the upper menu, I’m dividing into thirds, and iterating with lists.

In general, I’ve tried to round off a lot of corners. This involves more images than I’d normally like, but I’ve tried to take shortcuts wherever possible, combining multiple images and simply changing their positioning: I managed to reduce the number of server requests significantly from the early phases of the design, but I still have some more to go.

Which brings me to another thing: I’ve used some 24-bit PNGs, not only as icons but as background images as well. I made a half-hearted attempt to use ifixpng to resolve display issues for IE6, but when it didn’t work satisfactorily, I decided that I spend enough timer catering to IE6 users and work, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to expend any extra effort on my hobby site. So let me make myself clear:

Attention IE6 users: there is no good excuse to be using IE6. Either upgrade or use a different browser. Firefox is good, as is Opera. Or go away.

On with the tour: I’ve heavily incorporated the jQuery javascript library into my redesign, and attempted to make it as performance-tuned as possible by including the extra plugins in a common file, and gzipping everything on the fly.

Beyond that, the theme is pretty unremarkable, really, but (I hope) aesthetically-pleasing and useful. I’ve completely removed categories from the template, since I think that tags have much more utility.

Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Venom?

It wasn’t until a Mr. Ralph Dagza told me that I found out I had been selected for membership in 9Rules, a sort of “Best of the Web 2.0″ club for designers, writers, and bloggers (or all three in one). I entered some time ago, back even before my template change, and so I’m a little embarrassed that I’m not finished pounding down the loose nails and spackling the scratches in the paint yet.

Regardless, welcome, one and all to A Modest Construct, my Home Sweet Mélange. After a bit of cursory inspection, you’ll notice that the two topics which take up most of my space here are Free Software (I have an extensive page of Freeware or FOSS for Windows) and also books, which I read in abundance and review to some degree.

Enjoy your stay.

Firstly, here’s props to my host, Fuitadnet, a cheap and reliable Linux webhost. Secondly, here’s props to WordPress, my blogging software.