What you see right now is the product of several weeks of brainstorming, tinkering around in Photoshop, staying up late with SubEthaEdit and a significant amount of trial and error. I had planned to get this done by spring break, but it took much longer than I expected. Thanks for everyone that gave me feedback on my works in progress, whether it be from flickr, the K2 or 9rules forums.
Before I continue, I would like everyone's input (remember that Lurker Roll Call post... everyone) on the new design. If the site looks weirder than you think it should be, please try clearing your cache. The site looked odd the first time I accessed it online until I cleared the browser cache. I opted to put the sidebar back as it offers a space for much more content to live. The first thing you probably noticed was that it is much wider at 900 pixels. I've been playing with narrow designs for quite some time so I wanted to try something different. I call this design Defiance, it's a little pun on the old design, Deviance. Speaking of Deviance, when I can round up a few hours to clean up the code I would like to release it.
Shout Outs
I would like to thank the following people for dealing with my relentless CSS, PHP and WordPress questions on instant messenger at extremely odd hours throughout the past few days: Kristin Pishdadi for CSS jibber-jabber and encouraging me to submit this site to CSS Reboot, Kyle Neath, sacred creator of the Hemingway theme, for dishing out CSS consultancy with a non-chalant air, Colin Devroe for at least attempting to help me, Mike Stickel for actually helping me, Bryan Veloso for providing me with a comedic O_o; whenever I frantically instant messaged him code that did not work as well as inspiring my comment guidelines, Josue for letting me know my site looked horrible in IE, Chris Morrell for confirming that and finally, Zeo for providing me with some nitty-gritty WordPress and K2 information along with the reminder that my code base is horribly outdated.
Before You Go
Please drop a comment on what you think about the new redesign. There are some bugs I know about, but if you find one please let me know about it anyway. For example, Safari acts a little weird with the menu hover background images. I still need to find a place to put my feedburner icon thing. I had it under the 9rules logo but the mixture of negative margin and some other attributes made a huge difference in its FF vs. Safari layout.