The E Club+ has always been The E Club Family's leader in terms of new technologies and web design techniques. It introduced the responsive design, various JavaScript applications, and designs such as that of the form fields that have been used across The E Club Family ever since. In the last few weeks, we've been working on some things on The E Club+ to make it and The E Club Family even better.

Dark Mode

This one's been in development for quite a while, but now it's open to the public. Dark Mode is just what it sounds like - The E Club+, but with a dark color scheme. Just click on the Dark Mode link in the footer of each page and experience this new perspective.

Stunning Retina/HD Iconography

The E Club+ was the first in The E Club Family to have an in-house responsive version, but we've never stopped working on it. Now, I'm incredibly pleased to introduce SVG iconography to The E Club's flagship social network! These new, rethought icons look perfect on every screen. Make sure to look for them all over The E Club+!

A Sleeker Design

The E Club+'s smartphone/tablet version has always displayed useful components of the site such as the login/join buttons, notifications, +Messenger conversations, and profile management tools below the logo. But that format caused the header to take up quite a bit of space, reducing the part of each page you could see without scrolling. But now, we've built those functions into the custom-designed mobile menu, so they only appear when you need them. Not only does this new layout save much-needed space on smaller screens, but it also allows The E Club+ to look a lot more like The E Club, The E Club Lite, and The E Club Wiki, which have the same in-house responsive architecture. I hope you enjoy these new features, and make sure to stay tuned for more!

In the beginning of the year, The E Club+ got a mobile version. Soon after that, we migrated the site to a new server when Wall.fm was going to shut it down. A couple weeks ago, we redesigned The E Club+'s homepage. Now, I'm happy to add a new event onto the social network's rather eventful 2014 timeline: The E Club+ is now responsive.

The number of people who go online on smartphones and tablets is growing every day, and many sites now have mobile versions to help mobile users navigate and access information faster and easier. Now, with its cutting-edge responsive design, The E Club+ has joined the mobile revolution.

If you go on The E Club+ on a smartphone, tablet, or smaller-sized laptop, you will notice that the join form on the homepage is under the text. Due to technical reasons, smartphone users can't see the full width of either of them, but the header (with The E Club+'s logo on it) is the full width of the screen. Log in or join and you will be taken to the +iClub which scales perfectly to the size of any screen. Explore the rest of The E Club+ on any device and you'll find this is true throughout the entire site.

Enjoy the new updates!

At The E Club, we know that first impressions count. People do judge a book by its cover, and this also applies to websites and apps of all kinds. No matter how good a site's content or services may be, people generally tend to make judgements about websites in about 50 milliseconds or so.

Before The E Club+ migrated from Wall.fm, its homepage consisted of a large version of its old logo (a smaller version was on the header of the site) and quite a bit explaining its philosophies about member privacy, ease of use, and so on. After the migration, the interim design for the homepage was the simplified join form (similar to the one that's on the homepage today) accompanied by significantly less content about The E Club+ as well as buttons that let visitors join with their Facebook or Google account. The background was completely white except for the main menu of the site (but for people who hadn't joined, the only main menu item was the homepage they were on) and the redesigned logo. Yesterday, since the migration and design of the site were complete, we thought it was time for a redesign.

Today, I'm happy to say that the homepage of The E Club+ has been successfully redesigned. The dull, white background of the old homepage has been replaced by a stunning, high-def version of iOS 7's nebula background (we're planning to add more backgrounds in the future). We saved space for more content and more background to show through by putting the labels that were once next to the input fields in the input fields themselves thanks to HTML5's placeholder attribute. The main menu, which was unnecessary on the homepage, has been replaced by a bar at the top of the page with The E Club+'s logo and a link to the login overlay, and the footer has been redesigned to be more transparent than ever before. And, as an added bonus, we redesigned The E Club+'s favicon to reflect the new minimalistic ethos of the homepage.

The good news doesn't end here. In July, The E Club+ will get an update from Oxwall that will add even more awesome features to the site. And around that time, we will work to bring the new awesomeness of the homepage to the rest of the site.

Enjoy!

The E Club+ was shut down in April along with other free sites powered by Wall.fm. We were notified that this was going to happen in February, and since then we have worked to move and rebuild The E Club+ at another server, x10Hosting. We have, and it's still located at http://plus.theeclub.info, but we have redesigned and improved it so it's a much more powerful social utility than ever before. The E Club+ still runs on Oxwall, and I can gladly say that there are many new updates coming to The E Club+ through Oxwall in July. The most significant one is the introduction of +Messenger, the combination of +Mail and the newly-introduced +Chat. This will make casual communications easier than ever. +Photos will also be redesigned, introducing a new, innovative look, hashtags, and more. Other updates and tweaks will be included as well. Now that The E Club+ is safe at x10Hosting, great new things can happen. In the past few months, we've already redesigned the homepage so that it's easier than ever to join, added better anti-spam measures, redesigned the entire site so it works better on any device (even without using +Mobile, which excludes many features of the regular site for now), and added a variety of new features for users to use and enjoy. More information about the upcoming updates can be found on my +Blog at The E Club+.

A while ago, we introduced +Mobile for The E Club+, a small link on the bottom of each page that led users to the beta mobile site. Unfortunately, it didn't work too well: half the content couldn't be viewed, the login functionality didn't work too well, and the site looked ugly overall. So we phased +Mobile out for the time being, waiting for when The E Club+'s host, Wall.fm, would release a mobile interface like it said. Finally, a few days ago, +Mobile was re-introduced.

This time, we're getting the mobile interface right. Now, only mobile (specifically smartphone) users can access +Mobile automatically for a more seamless site all around. Since +Mobile was built for the platform, it and all of its features work perfectly in the new interface. In short, The E Club+ members now have a clean, good-looking interface if they choose to view it on mobile devices.

We are still testing and improving this interface, but for now, it works very well and can be accessed automatically by going to http://plus.theeclub.info on smartphones. I am happy to say that both of The E Club's social networks now have mobile interfaces.

I hope you enjoy The E Club+'s new +Mobile feature!

Cross-posted on The E Club World Blog.

Today, I am very happy to announce the release of quite a few new updates on the ClubIt! Platform. But before I get to that, here's what the ClubIt! Platform is all about and how it started.

History

When The E Club Social was first started, it needed a sharing button like all of the major social networks have. So, the ClubIt! Button ("ClubIt!", short for "Share this on The E Club", was going to be another name for The E Club Share) was born. It allowed members of The E Club Social to share websites or pages on The E Club Social's News Bank. Soon, we realized this technology was very basic and had to be upgraded. The E Club then partnered with the social sharing service AddThis, which began the ClubIt! Platform and the idea that the ClubIt! Button could replace all sharing buttons, such as Facebook's Like button, because the ClubIt! Button allowed anyone to share content on just about any social network. AddThis worked well for a while, until the platform became so important that we needed to customize the sharing menu (we designed and still design the buttons), which wasn't possible with AddThis. So, we found a new partner: AddToAny, an innovative social bookmarking platform.

The E Club quickly adopted AddToAny as the new base of the "ClubIt! OS", which powers the buttons and their innovative sharing menus. Instead of AddThis, which provided limited ways to brand its technology, AddToAny provided many ways to customize the sharing menu (and, of course, the button itself), and it even encouraged the customization of the sharing menu with CSS. Plus, we were even able to add options to share to The E Club Social and The E Club+ to the button. But there was one problem - the CSS and JavaScript we added to improve the button's design and functionality was just added on to the code of each individual button, so it was very hard to synchronize all of them when we released a new update.

Finally, we found a solution to this problem, and in September 2012, we released the new ClubIt! Button, where the CSS and JavaScript codes we added to the button were put in two files hosted by The E Club. The sharing menu also had The E Club's minimalist designs running alongside its latest technologies.

Since then, the ClubIt! Button code could be found on The E Club+ since it's our latest social network, and ClubIt! is a social sharing button. But today, we have an update that changes that.

What's new

Since writing the "Exploring JavaScript" article on WebAspire, The E Club's web design & technology blog, I learned a little more about JavaScript. Not much, but enough to write basic web applications. Yesterday, we took that one step further when we began writing the ClubIt! Button Designer - a dynamic HTML (DHTML) document we wrote in Notepad, the basic Windows text editor. Originally, we planned to have the Designer be on The E Club+'s ClubIt! Buttons page via iframe, but when it glitched, we decided to have it be its own standalone page. Now, you can get the code for a web-based ClubIt! Button, copied to your device's clipboard, in two clicks. We will be integrating ClubIt! for Blogger and WordPress.com in the future.

With this innovation comes another: The ClubIt! Button's sharing menu has been slightly redesigned. Each button is now equipped with the latest technologies, as well as awesome new designs. For example, there are two tabs at the top of each sharing menu: Share and Email. The Share tab lets you pick a service to share a website with, and the Email tab lets you select your e-mail client so you can e-mail the link of a site to someone else. Before, even if you were on the Share tab, the Email tab was wider. That doesn't make sense! Now, the menu detects which tab you're in and makes the button for that tab bigger - CSS3 transitions included. The menu also has an awesome new icon for the Email tab; before, it was an envelope, now it's an "@" sign with a completely transparent background.

And one more thing - two awesome new button designs are now available for websites at the Designer - Square Button Reloaded and Metal Square Button. Square Button Reloaded is inspired by The E Club Family's minimalist designs (a thin green plus sign and a thin gray border), and the ClubIt! text is in Open Sans. Metal Square Button is inspired by app designs such as that of iCloud. It has an intriguing metal background with dark gray text. The new buttons are now available for use on websites at the ClubIt! Button Designer.

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We hope you enjoy these updates to the ClubIt! Platform.