Passionate News Archives

December 31, 1998: Happy New Year! If you haven't noticed yet, we've had something of a face lift over the Holidays. While you were shopping and drinking eggnog, I was slaving over the keyboard (okay, and drinking a bit of eggnog, too). Some of the changes are cosmetic, like slightly changing our colors and formatting the screens so our 640x480 visitors can see everything. (And, those changes, not incidentally took the longest.) But we've also added four new sections to the web site (including this one), and the excitement level around here is pretty high. I think I now have some very small idea of the pain and pleasure a woman goes through when she gives birth. To quadruplets...

This page, Passionate News, is where we'll be posting the latest gossip. It's also where you'll find our Poem Of The Day and have the opportunity to sign up for our soon-to-be newsletter.

Our Special Requests section is for, uh, special requests. Visitors will find a form where they can ask our resident and visiting poets to write a verse on a specific topic for them. The poets, of course, will find new inspiration.

The Poetry Market is still a bit under construction, but we're going to be posting guidelines and addresses where our poets can send their wonderful works and, maybe, make a couple bucks in the process.

And finally, in our Classical Poems section, you'll find 75 of the greatest poets of all time, with close to one thousand of the best-ever poems ever penned by mortal man (and woman, of course).

January 9, 1999: The face lift which began over the Christmas holidays has continued in earnest during the first week of the new year. We've moved things around just a bit (Special Requests can now be found on this page, instead of off the main menu) and added still more surprises for you.

Perhaps the biggest new surprise is our Poetry Greeting Cards section. If you do nothing else during your visit today (shame on you), you need to check this one out. There are now 28 million consumer PC's connected to the Internet, a full one-third of all homes in the United States. We think the rest will join us soon just so they can find these unique greeting cards (hey, hyperbole is an established poetic device, right?).

The other really big news is something you won't even see (if we did everything right). Passions in Poetry has grown so large, so quickly, that we now have our own server and our own Internet address. We think http://netpoets.com/ will be the happening place in 1999. Don't worry; all your old bookmarks and favorites will still work. And all the menu options at the old site will bring you to the new one. But the old Passions site won't be updated after today, so be sure to flag this page as one of your favorites.

I hope you like all the changes. And, of course, I again want to thank all of my new-found friends that have taken the time to write with both glowing compliments and worthwhile ideas. By all means, keep those ideas coming and I'll keep adding new sections. We're just getting started. Oh, and if you keep the compliments coming, that'll be okay, too.

January 20, 1999: I have good news and I have bad news. The bad news is only a minor setback, a temporary one, and the good news more than compensates for it.

The bad news is that Excite just dropped the old Passions web site from its listing (as of yesterday). This wasn't an unexpected surprise, and was actually one of the many reasons we recently moved to our own domain. You see, Excite seems to have this thing against subpages (any page not directly off a main URL), and every time it reindexes its database, Excite purges subpages from the search listings. Our old site, of course, was such a subpage and every reference to Passions was a victim of their latest purge. Ouch.

I noticed the purge almost immediately, because traffic at Passions took a real nosedive. For those who don't know it, Excite is one of the most popular search engines on the Net, especially since it's the hidden engine behind both AOL's and Netscape's search engine. We have been getting a lot of traffic from Excite. Up until yesterday, if you search for almost any kind of poetry at all on one of Excite's many alter egos, Passions in Poetry would probably be listed on the first page of results. Sometimes, we were listed more than once. People, in other words, were finding it very easy to find us. We still have a very good ranking on many of the other search engines, and we're still getting good traffic. Just not as good.

But this is a temporary setback, because the new URL has already been submitted to Excite and, though it'll take about two weeks, I fully expect we'll get just as good a ranking this time as we did with the old site. Who knows? Maybe even better.

And that brings us to the good news.

Yesterday, I received email that Passions in Poetry would be listed in the Yahoo! directory within the next few days. As if you didn't already know it, Yahoo! is the most popular site on the Internet, with estimates that 47 percent of the people who log on will go straight to the Yahoo! directory. Yahoo! is also very selective who they list, and it's a really tremendous compliment to be included. Especially so quickly. The compliment really goes to you folks, all those who have written with such great ideas and such wonderful support. Hey, we must be doing something right!

February 2, 1999:   It's hard to believe it was only a month ago (tomorrow) that I registered the netpoets.com domain name with InterNic, and slightly less than two months (Friday) ago that we received our first poem submission on the old, shared web site.

As I write this, in preparation for updating Passions, I find there are over 70 new poems being posted to the site this time, more than double the last update. And, of course, our list of resident poets is growing just as rapidly. There are now ninety-something poets represented here, and the number seems to increase every time I check the dropbox. Who is going to be the landmark 100th Passionate poet? I suspect we'll know this week.

Our first historic issue of Digital Passions will be going out this week, too. And I think you're going to find a new surprises there, and a few hints of things to come. If you haven't subscribed to our free magazine, yet, there's still time. Resident poets, by the way, are automatically added to the list now; thought I'd just save them a step, don't ya know.

With any luck, and assuming I don't need to sleep this week, our next update will come a little quicker - and will likely offer a few new features as well. I'm currently redesigning the database, extending the focus for the Poetry Buffet so we can more easily add new categories.

February 17, 1999:   It's been all of two weeks since our last update, by far the longest I've ever gone without adding new poems to the web site. Now, before you get out the horse whips, let me explain.

Part of the problem has come from an unexpectedly wild response to our first issue of Digital Passions. If you haven't read it yet, you can find it posted off this page, and if you haven't subscribed yet - well, please do so before you miss the next issue. In our first issue of the free magazine, I threw out a few ideas for enhancements to Passions - and the response was tremendous. A lot of my time has been spent trying to make good on those promises. And, yes, the next week should see some really remarkable things happening on your favorite poetry site. So, stay tuned!

Another part of the problem has been the result of our rapid growth. Remember when we moved from the old URL, back in January, and I explained we had been dropped from the Excite search engine? Well, we're back... Couple the traffic we've been getting all along from Yahoo! with the new traffic from Excite (and a few other great links), and we've been very, very busy. I'm sure not complaining, mind you, but the increase in the number of poems submitted has risen just as sharply. As has the email I answer every day. It's a wonderful problem to have, but it has kept me away from the database too much.

Finally, I spend an inordinate amount of time this past week sorting through the votes for January's favorite poems. There were certainly a lot more of them than during December, and I'm afraid it was one part of the database system that had never been automated. So I had to sort and enter each one by hand, a task I will not have to do again, I promise you. It is now entirely automated. But be that as it may, we do have a list of the favorite poems for January. And, yes, there were a few surprises...

But, in spite of the recent problems, the web site now has over 100 more poems than it did yesterday, and I think you'll agree there are some real gems in the new bunch. We're attracting some wonderfully talented poets, people with both insight and beauty to share. I think you'll agree it was worth a two week wait.

Okay, guys and gals, am I forgiven? A little bit? Hey, would you put those whips away, please? You're making me nervous.

I promise -- it won't happen again!

March 2, 1999: It really seems strange to call 85 new poems a "partial update" of the web site, but that's exactly what it is. I have hundreds more to add, and hope to have most of them ready to post by this coming weekend.

But the new poems, while certainly the most important thing, are only part of the story. You're going to notice a few differences in the web site today, and while they're very minor differences, they are also harbingers of things to come in the next few weeks.

Notice, first, that the sort order of the poems has changed. Instead of going from the oldest to the news within each category, we now go from the newest to the oldest. That's because some of our category pages were getting so long that it took our regular visitors forever to scroll to the new stuff. Now they'll find it right at the top. And while that seems like a pretty minor thing, it turned out to be a can of worms once opened. Remember that little button that allows you to easily navigate to the Next poem? Yep. All the logic behind that had to be changed when I changed the order of the poems. Seems like nothing is ever easy, uh?

The change that will make the most difference in coming weeks, though, is the menu. Notice anything different?

There is no longer a category off the main menu for Poems on Beauty. Don't worry, it's not gone. It just moved. The Poems on Beauty category has now become a subcategory off the Poetry Buffet page. It was never one of our most popular areas (which surprised me), and by removing one of the graphical buttons it makes all of the pages on the site load a teeny tiny bit faster.

No big deal. Except - if this works it means we can soon have subcategories under all of our main categories. For example, I have been dying to put together a section specifically on Cyber Romance. And, thanks to the ground-breaking of our lovely PoetDeVine, we really need a section devoted to Erotic Love poems. In the next few weeks, with your help and feedback, it should be much easier to find exactly the poem you're seeking at Passions.

'Course, that only touches the proverbial surface of the changes that will soon be coming your way. Don't go away, folks - things are just starting to get exciting!

March 17, 1999:   The first thing I want to do is thank everyone for the tremendous amount of patience you've extended me in recent weeks. We've had a veritable avalanche of poems submitted, and I know some of you have been waiting a very long time to see yours posted. Thank you, indeed, for waiting so nicely. But I'd also like to ask you to be patient with me just a few moments longer, though on a slightly different matter. You see, this entry is likely to get really extensive today...

The Passions in Poetry

There have been a lot of changes to Passions this update, almost all the result of great suggestions from our wonderfully active visitors. For many of you, of course, the biggest news is the huge influx of new poems on the site. Some of you read the post I made in our Forum a week or two ago concerning the tremendous backlog of unposted poetry. In that post, I pointed out a number of things the resident poets at Passions could do to get their poems posted more quickly. Things like doing a spell check, removing extra spacing, not capitalizing their entire title. In short, all the things I've been doing by hand to make the poetry we post look good.

Well, after I made that post in the Forum I had something of an epiphany. All that tedious stuff I had been doing to every poem was, uh, tedious stuff. Which is another way of saying "computer stuff." If you've already read the article posted below, How Athena Learned to Program, you know that almost this entire web site is generated by a computer program. Well, gee, I thought to myself, since Athena is already writing the web pages, why can't she just edit the poems for me while she's at it?

It turns out Athena was willing to help where she could. She's real good at taking out extra spaces and line breaks, and she does a fair job of capitalization. Probably the biggest help is that Athena now reads the poems directly from the web server into the database, without the long and (need I say it?) tedious cut and paste I've used for the past several months. Unfortunately, though I frequently forget it, Athena is still just a computer. Her native language isn't English, and there's still a lot of things she can't fix for me. But she's been a tremendous help and is largely responsible for this huge update.

That solved our biggest problem and almost got me caught up on the backlog. But, as so often happens in life, solving one problem created a few more.

A Whole Look

One of the first problems I noticed when the new poems were added was that it was hard to tell which were new and which have been here a while. In the past, it was easy. All a visitor had to do was look at the dates. But many of the poems in this latest update go as far back as January. In some cases, they were skipped over because I didn't want a single poet dominating a page with too many poems, in other cases because they required a lot of editing. Now, though, as those older submissions were merged into our lists, they became lost.

The solution was pretty simple, actually. All of the poems from this update now have a button next to their dates. That should make it fairly easy to tell which ones you haven't read yet, right?

Oops, another problem. We just plain got too many poems! It's a wonderful problem, but still a problem. Our largest page is the Love Poems one, and it was already taking a good 2.5 minutes to load after our last update. With so many new poems added, that load time almost doubled! Our regular visitors don't mind waiting, but our new visitors don't always know the treat they have in store for them. They get impatient. They leave.

The solution, again, was fairly simple and has actually been in the planning stages for almost a month. Each of our major categories now has subcategories at the top of the poems list. So, instead of one great big huge list, we will now have several smaller ones. Of course, it has the added benefit that it should now be easier to find a poem on a specific topic. It's not a perfect solution, though. The Love Poems page still takes far too long to load. But it's a start, and over the next few weeks I'll be moving poems around a bit to lighten the load. Anyone who has suggestions for new subcategories, by all means, drop me a note.

A Feature

There's one more major change to the web site, but it's one you might accidentally overlook. About six weeks ago, I added a "Comments" field to the Voting form. And we've been getting some really great (and sometimes hilarious) comments on the poems.

Well, those comments have now been integrated into the database and Athena is now adding them to the poetry pages. Beneath the Response Panel is a new section for any comments that have come in on a particular poem. Obviously, not all the poems have votes, and not all the visitors who have voted wrote comments. But those that are there are pretty entertaining, and many should bring a pleasant smile to a hard working poet's face.

In Closing (can't really use the icon here; oops, I just did)

While we're still talking about the Voting (we are, aren't we?), I want to mention that our next update will include the results of February's tally. I almost included it in this update (I know who won, I know who won...), but I figured you people could only handle just so much excitement. :-)

In a similar vein, I'd also like to mention that our Forums are becoming far more active (thank you, Sunshine!) and you should feel free to post your public comments about a poem there. Our resident poets work very hard, and it's always nice to get a little positive feedback. You might also like to check out the poems being posted in the Critic's Corner (our second Forum - use the drop down box to get there.)

Our next issue of Digital Passions should be going out to everyone a few days after the next update, and there's going to be some really killer surprises revealed. Along with some killer poems I've been saving just for the newsletter. If you haven't subscribed yet, you don't know what you're missing. (If you've had a poem posted at Passions, you're already subscribed!)

I hope everyone enjoys the new poems, the new look, and the new features. But don't get too complacent and start feeling like you know your way around the web site. Because in the words of the great Gypsy Rose Lee, "You ain't seen nothing, yet!"

April 15, 1999:  As usual, this update to the web site brings a few changes to Passions. Many of those, though, are under-the-hood changes that you'll only notice subtly (faster loading pages) or won't notice at all for a few more weeks (static file names now, so we can update the site more often). Of course the biggest change, as always, is the huge influx of new poetry. It varies a bit (probably one of those moon things), but we're now receiving about 40 to 50 new poems a day. There are a lot of very talented poets in this wonderful digital world.

Little Things

The more visible changes won't effect the way you read poetry on a day-to-day basis, but will impact the way you interact with the web site. Our voting rules, for example, have changed. Now that we are posting visitor comments on the poems, taken from the voting form, it no longer makes sense to limit everyone to a single vote a day. You can now vote as often as you'd like, though we'll still count only one vote per author per day for each visitor. That's simply to discourage little Jenny from voting for her sister's poem 500 times a day. You can read the new rules here Voting Rules or find them the next time you hit the voting booth.

We're also adding a few new off-the-site features. You can now register to be notified when the web site is updated so you don't miss any of the great new poems we're posting. Send us your email, and within hours of a new site update we'll send you a message. You'll find a link on all of the Poetry Index pages, or you can use this one right here. Don't Miss Out!

We've added a number of new sub-categories, and will probably continue to do so as the situation merits. One of our new categories, called More Love Poems, exists only so we can keep our poem index pages at a reasonable size. There's well over a thousand poems on the site now, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to make it both easy to find them and still list them without the need to eat dinner while the page is loading.

For the same reason, we've added additional "Next Poem" buttons on each poetry page - so you'll have to go back to the big index pages far less frequently.

Big Things

The biggest news, besides so many new poems, is that we've posted a new "Favorite Poem" of the month. Be sure to check out February's winner right away, because next week we'll be posting March's.

Just as exciting as the winning poet, however, we've also added a new Visitor of the Month award. After all, without our great visitors, the poets would be playing to an empty room. You can read all about it, of course, on the Favorites page.

Don't Go Away

Our next update is going to be very, very soon. It has to be - I have so many poems yet to post my hard disk is running out of space. And, yea, in addition to several hundred more poems, you can be pretty sure I'll have a few more surprises in store for everyone. There'll be a number of additional Little Things. And maybe even one or two really Big Things, too.

May 11, 1999: Today will go down in Passionate history as the Update that was not an Update. Uh, guess that needs some explaining?

On April 30th, I received a very rude surprise when I visited our site. It was running like a dog. I mean, I've seen molasses streaming up hill, in the middle of February, running faster. It took long, breathless seconds just to connect to netpoets.com, and often several minutes just to download a single page. That's when the page would completely download, of course. As often as not it would instead terminate with a network error.

I'm going to spare you a lot of gory details about the next several days. I won't tell you about the unnecessary work I did on the server, the investigation of my local ISP, or all of the phone calls I made or emails I sent. It took me almost a week, but I finally discovered the problem.

There are a lot of discrete parts that make the Internet work. At the very lowest level are the physical pipes (wires) that run from your machine all the way to the Passionate server. Lots of different pipes. And, as in the real world, those pipes come in many different sizes. The pipe running from my computer (and presumably yours) to the wall is the smallest. It's a garden hose type pipe, and I can only push just so much water (er, bytes) through it at one time. That's okay, though, because I'm the only one using it. At the other end of the spectrum is the Internet Backbone, a very small group of pipes so large that all the water in the world (er, bytes) can flow swiftly through them at one time. These are river-size pipes, and they have to be because everyone uses them at the same time! Between these two extremes are the irrigation hoses (Ethernet, ISDN's, DSL's, cable modems and such), the fire-hoses (or T1's), the conduits that run under the street of a city block (the T3's), and the still larger pipes that connect directly to the city reservoir (the OC3's and larger). Lots and lots of pipes, all serving different purposes.

Well, on April 30th, we got a clog in one of our pipes. The Passionate server was connected to the rest of the Internet via a T1, one of those fire-hose size pipes. Not a really big pipe to start with, and I had it in the back of my head we would soon have to upgrade - but it was getting us by. Trouble was, we weren't the only one using that particular pipe. A dedicated T1 costs between five and seven grand a month (and you thought the Internet was free?), so we were sharing it with a lot of other servers. The company that owns the pipe, called an "uplink" in Net parlance, makes their money by investing capital in the big pipes and then renting them out.

The problem is that Passions in Poetry has been just a tad too successful lately. We were supposed to be using just a piece of our T1, but we were in actuality using darn near the whole thing. Like any finite sized pipe, you can only push just so much water (er, bytes) through it at one time. And the other servers on our shared pipe to the Internet started complaining they couldn't get anything through. So, our uplink put a valve between the Passionate server and the T1 to make sure we couldn't hog his whole fire hose. And, my friends, it turned out to be a really small valve!

So, for most of the past two weeks, our poetry has been trickling across the Internet instead of flowing. Highly unacceptable. Well, as of today, Passions is back to a steady flow. At least for most of us. Last week, you see, I went out and bought us a new pipe.

Unfortunately, life is seldom simple. I'll admit that I could have just disconnected our old pipe, hooked in the new, bigger pipe, and we'd have been back up and running just like the old times. But only for a while. Passions has grown incredibly fast over the past few months, and that doesn't seem to be changing. Had I replaced our teeny pipe with the next size up, we would have just faced the same problem again in a few months.

For those who don't like technical talk, please skip this paragraph and move ahead to the next. The main Passions site is now running on a T3, albeit as a temporary solution. On May 15th, we'll be down for about five hours as the server gets moved to a whopping OC48 line (a really big pipe). But we still don't get the whole pipe (I ain't rich, ya know), so we're also utilizing a technique called load-sharing. When you're reading a poem you'll be on our new T3-soon-to-be-a-OC48 line, but when you go to vote on a poem, or send a poem to a friend, or submit a poem, or do any one of many other such things, you'll actually be moving to different web server. Watch the URL. Watch it change from netpoets.com to something else (right now, netpoets.net). I've spent most of the past week completely rewriting the Passions web site so it can easily run on multiple servers. Right now, we'll be using two. As we continue to grow, it should be easy (I pray!) to add more.

So that's the story. Well, most of it. I guess those who don't like technical talk should probably skip this paragraph, too. Sorry. You see, life really is rarely simple, and neither is our move to a bigger pipe. The whole Internet is managed by a large group of computers called Domain Name Servers, or DNS servers (and, yea, I know there's a redundant "servers" in there, but that's just what they're called). When you type in an URL or click on a link or bookmark or favorite, one of the DNS servers looks up the "name" and translates it to an IP number so it can find the web server you want. All of the several thousand DNS servers share a common database, which comes from Network Solutions, better known as InterNIC. The problem is, all of those DNS servers don't update their database as often as they might. Some, in fact, only update about once a week. Well, when I moved the Passionate server to a new pipe we had to change the database. So, there's going to be some people, maybe as many as 20 percent of the world, that won't find the *new* site for as much as a week. When those poor souls go to netpoets.com they'll be going to the old, slow as molasses web server. At least until their DNS server updates the database so they can find the new site.

Unfortunately, those of us in the lucky 80 percent group have to pay just a teeny-tiny price to accommodate those poor people in the 20 percent group. You see, I don't dare add any new poetry to Passions until the old, slow server has died completely. If I did, the several thousand notices I would also have to send out, telling the poets and visitors there's new material posted, would be lying to 20 percent of the world.

And that, my friends, is why this will officially be the Update that wasn't an Update. There's no new poetry to announce, and won't be for at least a few more days. But, trust me -- it's coming!

June 14, 1999:   Many of you will see today's update of the web site and say, "Well, it's about time!" And rightfully so, too. Passions has been plagued by a rash of technical problems in the past sixty days, some of which we've talked about on this page, and some of which would only bore you. Suffice it to say, it's become increasingly difficult to get new poetry to you in a timely manner.

And that is unacceptable. It's unacceptable to me, and judging by the email I've been receiving, it's unacceptable to you. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any easy solutions.

There are over 300 new poems on the site today. I have about 2,000 more that are still unedited and unposted. Some of our poets have been waiting six weeks or more for their work to be published. I've decided it is completely unfair to those people to continue falling farther and farther behind.

Effective immediately, Passions will no longer be accepting new poems.

This was a very difficult decision to make. And I recognize it isn't a solution, but only a temporary breather. Hopefully, a very temporary one.

The good news is that you can expect a lot of new poetry in the next few weeks. I am completely freezing development of the web site and concentrating all of my efforts on getting the backlog of poems posted. So, get ready for a concentrated deluge of great new poetry.

I have hopes that our temporary suspension of accepting new poems will be short-lived. A couple of weeks, a month at the most. And during that time, I'm going to be looking for permanent solutions to the problems that have plagued us, ways to increase the efficiency of what we do. I would certainly welcome any suggestions from you, our loyal visitors and poets.

New Stuff

Enough with the depression! In spite of the difficult changes, there are also a few new features in this latest update that you should know about. Our next update will bring you new menus that incorporate a lot of the changes we've made in recent months, but until then you can access the new features from the text menu at the bottom of every page.

First, we now have a FAQ page. For those of you don't know, FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions and it has become a staple on the Internet almost since the web's inception. And for good reason. Up until about a month ago, I was spending at least an hour a day, often several hours, trying to answer all the email I receive. Often, I was answering the same questions over and over. I haven't been answering most of those for the past month, because I thought it more important to get the site updated. So, if you've written to me to find out what happened to your poetry, you now know why I haven't been able to answer. But that is just one of the many questions that I've tried to cover extensively in our new FAQ. Please read it.

We also have a new Search facility available. Again, up until recently, I was spending a lot of time tracking down poems for people. To be honest, it was something of an ego trip for me. Someone would write, looking for a poem for a certain occasion or person, and I could almost always direct them to three or four that would suit their needs. It made me feel good to think I knew our database of poetry so well that I could find just the right poem out of thousands. But it was an expensive ego trip in terms of time. Now, with just a little effort and thought, you should be able to find those poems yourself. And you won't risk me forgetting the perfect one for you, either.

The Best Is Yet To Come

On July 3rd, Passions will celebrate its official six-month anniversary. It's been an incredible six months. We've gone from half a dozen pages with just a few of my personal poems, to over 5,000 web pages representing the work of almost a thousand wonderful poets. We've watched our traffic grow even more quickly, watched as thousands of people spend hour after contented hour reading poetry every day. Perhaps more importantly, we've made a lot of great friends along the way.

Our road has not been without a few bumps, of course. But every single problem we've experienced has been a direct result of our very success - and those are the kind of problems that are always solvable. Passions is still a child, learning to walk. We've got a few skinned knees, but like any child we'll continue to try. Like any child, we'll learn.

December 20, 1999:   Finally! We have a new update, with nearly 1,000 new poems added to Passions. Including some real gems!

Yea, I know it's been a while. Too long! But this update includes a lot of new features that will, I hope, make future updates easier and more frequent. The first thing I'm sure you'll notice is our new menus. Most have really been in place for quite a few months - you were just getting there via text links before. Most of the really new features are albeit hidden.

Here's one quick example. Several months ago I put in a More Love Poems subcategory simply because the Love Poems page was getting way too long. Moving several hundred poems to a new section helped make it load more quickly. Trouble is, Love Poems almost immediately filled back up and became too big again. Sheesh, suddenly I needed a Still More Love Poems section! And it takes a lot of my time, time that could better be spent posting new poetry, to create a new section and move poems into it.

So I tried to come up with a better solution, one that didn't require a lot of time once it was implemented. All of the categories and subcategories will now manage their own length - splitting into new pages when they get too long to load quickly. At the bottom of the Love Poems page, for instance, you'll now find a link that takes you to Page 2 of the Love Poems section. And Page 2 will take you to Page 3, if necessary (and it is!). The real trick here is that I no longer have to spend my time creating new pages or new categories simply to handle the over-flow. The system will do it automatically!

That's just one example, but there are many, many more even less visible on the surface. All designed to give me more time to do what I should be doing - posting poetry!

For Poets Only

Until recently, when I became completely deluged, I spent a lot of my time writing to our poets about the status of their submissions. We long ago passed the point where I could "remember" every poem submitted, so it often took me a bit of time to track down the poem. Okay, it doesn't sound like all that much work. But multiply it by the number of poems we receive and it gets to be almost overwhelming very quickly.

I found what I hope will be a solution. When a poet submits a poem to Passions the system has always emailed them back and, among other things, gave them an URL to a private Poet's Only section of Passions. There wasn't a lot there: a few statistics, some simple guidelines, a bit of news not available to general visitors. But I've now added to that page a new section called Submissions Report. Yep, poets can now check the status of their poems on-line, from a full database of all poetry submitted to Passions in the past several months (it doesn't go back to the very beginning, but it does come close).

If you've submitted a poem to Passions and it hasn't been published yet, you can check the status of it at the new Submissions Report section. Uh, you did save the URL we sent you, right? Okay, okay, if you've lost the URL you can send email to poetspage@netpoets.com and the system will send it to you again.

The Bonding of Passions

I'm going to make a confession to you. This last delayed update to the web site hasn't been entirely justified. Yea, I really do have a ton of poems to edit. Yea, I did add a lot of new features that will, in the long run, make updates easier and more frequent. Yea, we're still experiencing technical problems that have continued to eat away at my burdened schedule. And, yea, I even took a bit of personal time to move into a new house. But the truth is, I've also been spending an inordinate amount of time socializing with about a thousand other enthusiastic poets.

If you have to ask where, then you simply haven't discovered the new Passionate Forum yet. Three months ago, give or take, I opened the doors with a handful of our regular contributors and a few poems everyone had already seen. Today, you'll find over about two thousand registered members, over ten thousand poems (stories, too), and nearly a hundred thousand comments and replies. Can you say "explosive growth," my friends?!

To say I'm pleased with the Forum's tremendous growth is a terrible understatement. To say I'm proud of the incredible quality of the poetry being posted in the Forum is almost a joke. But the growth, and even the quality, are only part of the story. And they're only part of the reason I find myself spending hour after hour every day reading the poetry and comments of my fellow poets.

The Passionate Forum has become far more than simply a place to post good poetry, and far more than simply a place to receive feedback on that poetry. Our members do that, of course. They also help each other learn new and sometimes better ways to express themselves. They explore different poetic formats, to the benefit of all. They discuss, often in great detail, their philosophies on love, life, death, anger - all the feelings and intangibles that provide the nexus of our urge to write. They help each other to grow, both in their craft and in their ways of seeing the world.

But underlying all the "activities" we find in the Forum is something far more basic, far more important, far more difficult to describe or understand. Some might call that underlying theme a sense of camaraderie. Some might call it simple friendship. Many of the Forum members have repeatedly called it a sense of family. It doesn't really matter what you call it, I guess, but I can guarantee you that you'll feel it almost immediately.

The Forum has become a place where the optimist can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the pessimist who sees the world through a shadow of depression. It has become a place where the perfectionist craftsman can share space with those more interested in conveying their deepest emotions. It has become a place where the distinction between humorous and serious subjects becomes blurred, where meter and rhyme can coexist with free verse and prose. It has, in short, become a place where differences matter far less than commonalties, where respect and tolerance have become foundational pivots for all we do and much of what we may become.

There are no color barriers in the Forum, no generation gaps, no divisions between the educated and those still learning. You won't find national borders separating us, even though membership encompasses virtually every English-speaking country in the world. There aren't any lines drawn in the sand between religious groups, nor walls built between creeds or economic classes. There are only people, brought together by a common love of the written word and a desperate need to express themselves and be heard.

And those common bonds, strengthened by the foundational pivots of respect and tolerance, have evolved into something much more than simply a large group of really good poets. The Passionate Forum has somehow developed an almost tangible feeling of belonging. There's a deep-felt sense that each and every member of the Forum, no matter how diverse or different, is accepted for who and what they are. And very much appreciated for all they have to offer.

Friends? Yes. Family? I believe so. And maybe, just maybe, a harbinger of what this whole world can become when love and respect are permitted to gain a foothold within our hearts.

July 10, 2000: The good news is we have LOTS of good news. The bad news is we don't have any new poetry posted yet. But we will have. Very soon.

Many of you have written to me over the past few months and already know the story. For those who don't, I'll give a brief summary. Very simply, we ran out of disk space. When we moved from a shared server to Ceres, our own dedicated machine, way back last September, we went from 350 meg to 4 gig of disk. Wow, I thought! That'll last us forever! Those are "famous last words" in the computer industry.

In truth, though I didn't realize it at the time, we didn't really get 4 gig. After the operating system took its share, we were left with about two. Our last big update added nearly 3,000 pages to the main site, grabbing a big chuck of that, and about the same time our forums starting going crazy with increased traffic. As I write these words, the forums now hold in the neighborhood of 35,000 poems. For the past several months, I've been struggling almost daily to keep us running, at one point removing a very large portion of the forum archives.

Yea, I know disk drives are cheap. But not cheap enough, especially when we're talking about SCSI drives rather than the slower IDE drives you normally find in PC's. Passions relies almost entirely on advertising to pay our way, which in turn relies on your support, and frankly, not many people seem willing to click on a banner and leave all this great poetry behind. Can't say I blame you too much, either.

Honestly, I thought we were pretty much stuck until September. That's when our one-year lease on Ceres expires. As is so often true in the computer industry, it's actually cheaper to get a new, faster computer with a much bigger disk drive than it is to add a new drive to our existing machine. I figured we had little choice but to struggle though until the Fall.

But I surprised myself. A few weeks ago, after several months of programming, I installed new software in our forums. There are lots of new features (including an exciting one I want to talk to you about in a few moments), but maybe the most significant was finding a way to compress a large portion of our forum database. Overnight, we went from having our available space 93 percent full to only 59 percent. We got back roughly a third of our disk, about 700 meg, more than enough for a pre-September update of the main site. We be rocking!

It's going to take another week or two, but you can look forward to new poetry at Passions very, very soon. Perhaps more important to many of you, I also give you my solemn promise that this update will finally exhaust our backlog of submissions.

Passions, in short, will very soon be accepting new poetry submissions!

Are You A Poet?

If you've looked around Passions today, you might have noticed a new icon sprinkled here and there (there's one on this page, just below our menu). It really should read:

Are you a poet who would like the opportunity to be published in Passion's very first, printed-on-real-paper poetry anthology?

But, uh, it wouldn't be an icon any more if I made it that long.

That's the "other" new feature in the forums I wanted to talk about today. The forum software now allows our Members to submit poetry for inclusion in Voices on the Web, our first real book. It also allows the other Members to vote for the submissions. Those that receive the most votes will become part of what I believe is going to be the best English poetry anthology ever published. We have some really, really talented people participating!

I could say a lot more about the book here (don't get me started!), but in truth, I've already said it elsewhere. If you're a poet, look for the "Are You A Poet?" icon and click on it. I suspect you'll soon be just as excited as I am.

We're just getting started...

The main site update, new poetry submissions, and (of course) the book are going to be occupying most of our efforts during the early summer months. But as exciting and important as those are, they don't even scratch the surface of everything planned at Passions. I've already completely redesigned our Greeting Card section, for example, adding a dozen new graphical poems that are just as unique as our original ones. I'm hoping that will be part of our next update in the next week or two. But even that is just a beginning.

Some of the new features you'll see at Passions have already surfaced, albeit in a limited fashion, within our new forum software. Soon, every poem at Passions will be a Greeting Card, an ability already implemented in the forums. We'll have printer-friendly pages for every poem. Perhaps most exciting for me, Passions will soon offer free web sites, designed specifically for poets. And, of course, we're already planning our next book, one centered around the great poetry at the main site and based on the votes of our visitors.

Yep. We're just getting started.

August 9, 2000: Surprisingly, there's not a lot to say about this update. For the first time in a long time there are no "new" features, per se, to discuss, just an extension of what has been here for some time. There's lots of new poetry, of course. And while it may not be our largest-ever update, I think in many ways it might be our best in terms of quality poetry.

There are also about a score more graphical greeting cards available, though you'll have to hunt a bit to find them. Normally, the Greeting Card link in our main menu would take you to a page that lists all the available cards. But that page was already too big and the new additions would have pushed it into the 10-minute-load-time zone. Once we're on the new web server (see my last News entry), I'll be installing a brand new version of the Greeting Card software, with categories and lots more options. Stay tuned.

For many, the biggest news perhaps is that we've finally exhausted what seemed like an infinite supply of backlogged poetry. For the first time in nearly a year, Passions will be again be accepting new submissions at the main site (those participating in our very popular Forums have been able to submit since last December).

Should You Submit Your Poetry?

The form for submitting your poetry (oh, and short stories now, too) has changed a little but not a lot. Submitting is as easy as clicking the Submit button in our full menu. For the best chance of being published, be sure to read the short articles linked from that page.

There is, of course, only one reason to submit your poetry to Passions - to be exposed to a larger reading audience. At first glance, most people would assume this web site it built around poetry, but that's only part of the truth. Passions, in fact, is built around sharing. If you wish to share your words, your thoughts, your feelings, your very essence, you will likely never find a better opportunity. Or a more receptive audience.

Passions in Poetry has grown tremendously in our relatively short life. Our growth hasn't just been in terms of numbers, but also very much in terms of impact. A short time ago in our forums, I wrote a little about what Passions has become, and I'd like to repeat here a part of what I said there.

Our poems have been read as eulogies at funerals, as vows at marriages, as lessons by the teacher in front of a class. They have brought estranged friends together for the first time in years, been the sole vehicle whereby one family member could speak to another, and - in at least one alleged instance - resulted in a man proposing to the woman he loved a week after she emailed him a poem. They bring solace and joy, and a release from feeling as if no one else has ever felt what we now feel. At our peak, the main site gets over a million visitors a month (our summer traffic is less), but that's still only a fraction of the people who ultimately read the poems. Several million more a month receive the poems in their email boxes, and we can only guess how many of those are forwarded to others, how many are printed out and handed to others, how many hear the words spoken directly.

True story. One visitor, who spent several hours at Passions, cast 27 votes in the course of a day. Since the votes and comments are stamped with the date and time, I could literally follow her through the site. Her earlier comments were terse, small but meaningful pats on the back for the poets. "Beautiful poem," she would write. "Very nice message." As the hours passed, however, I noticed a change. Her comments became not just more protracted, but also more personal. She would no longer just say it was a good poem, but would tell why it related to her, why it had touched her. By the end of her day at Passions, I probably knew more about her life than many in her family did. She had absorbed more than the heartfelt messages from the poetry, more than just the beautiful flow of words and images. I believe our poets taught her, through their own examples, how to open her heart. And in that moment, though her use of English didn't really improve, that visitor to the main site became a poet. Can there be any greater reward to this thing we do than that?

Submitting your poetry to Passions probably won't change your life. But it just might change the life of someone else.

September 12, 2001:   The poetry submissions at Passions have been shut down for a long time now. I am in the process of completely rewriting our software, to better handle the heavy load we've unearthed, and I've already bought a new web server more capable of sustaining our millions of visitors. We are still several weeks from completion, still several weeks from being able to accept general submissions.

But these halls that have remained silent for so many months can remain silent no longer. The tragedies of yesterday, September 11, have understandably sparked an outpouring of emotions, and a relentless deluge of questions and doubts. People need to talk. To explore. To come together in sympathy, in outrage, and perhaps in understanding.

I honestly don't know where I will put any more poetry, but I am nonetheless inviting those who wish to share their pain and anger to submit it to Passions for immediate publication. I am opening a special page, linked only from this news article, for your submissions. Writers throughout the world, those with poetry within their hearts, must come together and help the stricken find solace and understanding. We must help others remember the people, not as numbers, not as faceless deaths, but as brothers and sisters of the heart.

We are the voice of the world, not of just one nation. We are the voice of the common people. We must be heard.