First the redesign: I made the redesign a quick one above all; the result is of course a simpler site. It is not very polished or web 2.0-compliant but I care not. This place is about text anyway. I do hope readability has improved with the light background.

Then the writing: things have been quiet around here. That is not because I no longer enjoy history or writing about it, but because I started an academic study in History at Utrecht University which gives me plenty of history to write about, even without this website. For the last couple of months I’ve been finding my way around in a new city, a new school and new friends.

So the bad thing is: I’m so busy with writing about history there’s little time left to write about history. Then again, the good thing is I’ve got lots of interesting stories to tell. What is one to do? I’ve thought about stopping this site but decided against it. I would come to regret it pretty soon. So I’ve decided to give it another try and see where it goes.

Note: this has been a quick redesign. Mind your head, things might come tumbling down. I will repair the older posts and tweak the design over time.

And really, you should! Don’t think they’ll never accept you because you don’t have hundreds of comments on every post, or because you’re not a rock-star webdesigner. The only thing that counts is passion. Passion for what you do. Do you know what I mean? Than you also know why it’s good to be one of the cool kids: everybody in the network is driven by passion. Interaction with these fellow ‘rulers is great—hence the 9rules forum is a real productivity killer. And you know you love to kill productivity. Oh and yeah, there’s also some serious gains in traffic and readership (note: not the same thing) to be gained, but that’s not really what’s it all about.

So got a website? Heads up then and subscribe as soon as you can.

About the new design

Although I have redesigned this site about three times now, I’ve always kept to a certain theme. Changes in the design and functionality always stayed within certain boundaries, and this rendition of my theme is no different—although it takes a greater step forward than previous iterations did. I’m moving to an even stronger monochromatic colour palette, I’ve dropped the radiating blue and got rid of the flower decorations. All in all I’ve tried to make the page a bit easier on the eye without changing the content all that much.

But the content has changed. Right now there’s no list of recent links, no links to fellow 9rulers and no blogroll. I’m not sure whether this change will be permanent. I am paying more attention to my own content now, giving the user more options to browse the archives or search the site. I now use an extra little list with ‘featured content’ to help readers discover more interesting articles. In the end it should help improve the findability of individual articles rather than the site as a whole.

Also new are article pull-quotes, JavaScript-powered footnotes, improved print stylesheets (although they’re still under construction), improved series-linking, gravatar-enable comments and… advertisements! They’re only displayed on long-enough article pages, though.

About the reboot

So I’ve rebooted the site and now all is back to normal. Alas, no! I had to make quite an effort to reboot today. Despite that the new design is live now the to do-list still sports a lot of tasks. There’s a huge task of editing all previous articles to adapt to the new functions of the new theme, there are most probably a bunch of dead links and there’s a lot of work under the hood to be done if I want to make this a stable theme.

I do want to make this a stable theme, for I now order myself not to redesign this site until May first, 2007. Until then there will only be small, incremental changes. The next couple of days or maybe even weeks will see various fixes here and there, so mind your head.

Interesting reboots

There are a lot of other interesting reboots out there. That’s why there’s the CSS reboot homepage. At the time of writing it’s down, so I’ll point you to the hot stuff when I find it.

• Avalonstar by Bryan Veloso
• Jonathan Snook
• Paul Stamatiou
• Chris J. Davis
• IfElse by Phu Ly
• Broken Kode by Khaled Abou Alfa

Update

• Matt Brett
• [EchoFaith](http://www.echofaith.com/ “Visit echofaith.com) by Jesse J. Anderson

1. Panzer Leader by Heinz Guderian
2. The Dictators by Richard Overy
3. The great war for civilization: the conquest of the middle east by Robert Fisk
4. The 1916 battle of the Somme by Peter Liddle
5. Europe and the people without history by Eric R. Wolf

So I’ve got plenty of work to do. At least it gives me an excuse when posting frequency drops. But I’m very excited about all this great literature and you can count and seeing some of these titles return here soon.

This is what I like about writing: to me it’s all about discovering, researching and thinking. The actual written piece is just a by-product of the whole process. So, once I had finished my ‘research’ the drive to write it down dropped significantly. I still wrote it of course and I’m happy with the result, but the original drive had disappeared. The whole point of this blog is not writing but thinking.

If you have something you care about, something you find very interesting—like I do history—then I advise you to write about it. No matter what you write, it’s a great experience and a great way to dive into it deeper.

Writing a series of posts

I really enjoyed writing the series, but writing a string of posts has some downsides:

• the blog loses it’s ‘blog’-feel, as updates are quite infrequent; it becomes more of a ‘magazine’
• longer articles stringed together are harder to read than shorter ones
• not wanting to break the series kept me from writing other stuff

The gaps between the individual posts were a bit too large for my liking, as I had to refocus every time I wanted to continue writing. I can only imagine how it must be for the readers’ liking. Moreover, in between posts I had to urge to write some shorter pieces on different subjects as I came across interesting facts or ideas. I didn’t want to break the chain of the series though, so I found myself not writing those. I want to prevent that in the future too.

In conclusion, although I will continue writing series of posts, they will not be very frequent nor as long as this one.

The whole article

I have put together all the posts from the series and combined them into one master article to rule them all. This document contains some minor changes here and there, some pictures and some nice quotes to spice it up a bit. So check it out (PDF).

Apart from this location-change I will also be implementing some other minor additions to this site, as well as removing some annoying elements. If you experience any problems that are not resolved within 15 minutes, please let me know.

The new design sticks to the old theme of black and blue with some hastily-drawn flowery-thingies on top. I gave myself some room to play with by adding a sidebar to the layout. This enables me to link to my fellow 9rules-ho’s, display some other links, some more links (hey, it’s a blog) and some ads to pay the bills. But that’s not all. I’ve changed the main typeface to enhance readability and I’ve paid a little more attention to alternate style sheets this time. See this in action by hitting print preview, or, if you’re a Firefox-user, choosing the ‘enhanced contrast’-stylesheet.

Two more important changes: commenting and series. I’ve enabled commenting to see if this site can spark some discussion. Even when sticking to the facts, nothing is more subjective than history and I am pretty sure people are going to disagree with my writing. Let’s see if they want to raise their voices. And, with a little WordPress plug-in magic, I’ve now tied posts in a series together. You can now browse through a series and skip other posts that come in between the series’ articles. It even has a table of contents.

Last, and certainly also least, I’ve extended the metadata-blah blah at the end of every article, even giving you the chance to post the article directly to del.icio.us. What more could you possibly want?

That about wraps it up. If you notice anything odd or broken, let me know and I’ll fix it. Now get away from the computer and go enjoy the holidays.

UPDATE: I noticed my redesign has some “issues” in IE, but I can’t be bothered too much about that. I’ll look into it next time I have an entire weekend off, if you catch my drift.

UPDATE: WordPress was updated, and all seems well so far. You also might notice a slight redesign of my site. I thought: if I’m going to upgrade WordPress, I might as well do the entire site.

UPDATE 2: I’ve pretty much updated everything. I’ve processed my old posts (assign new tags/categories, allow comments, etc.), got my plug-ins up and running and I think the new template should be working fine by now. Stay tuned for a short briefing on the new theme.

I’ve been following the network from day 1 and I always looked at it as “it would be good for my site to be part of it”. As it evolved, I came to think “it would be good for me to be part of it”—there’s an amazing amount of experience and talent in this community. Realising I could learn so much from it all is what made me sign up in round three, I guess.

It’s great to be part of it now, and I had a warm welcome. I hope to make a worthy addition. With history, yet another niche is filled in this long-tail network. Yay to that.

I’m just beginning as a writer on history; I hope my writing’s good enough to make people read it completely, and still want to come back for more. So, if you’ve got any feedback, feel free to drop me line. I’d be delighted if you do!