Latest News for ThePoeticLink.com

To Write to me, simply send mail to: Webmaster@ThePoeticLink.com I read all of your comments and suggestions... don't be shy!

News Entry Date: 4/16/2000 11:37am

Now that I have made the music portion of The Poetic Link so very simple. I would like to invite anyone who cares, to send me music for the site. I will upload it for everyone to enjoy. All I ask is that you use the following naming format: The_Entire_Song_Name_-_Artist_Name.mid The Artist Name is not so important, but if you can please put the title in properly that would be awesome. Just send me an e-mail with the midi files attached and NAMED PROPERLY. I do not want to have to worry about renaming a bunch of songs :) So name them correctly before attaching and sending. If you don't know what a midi file is or how to attach them to e-mail, then don't worry about it OK. I am simply offering this to people who know what I am referring to.

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I am happy to announce that thanks to a suggestion from Charles L. East, we now have the pleasure of listening to music while reading poems. I have added a nice little window to do this. I have also totally rewritten the music routines on this site. You may not notice a big difference, but I can now add new songs just by dropping them into my midi directories! I used to have to do a ton of junk to add songs. Now it's as easy as uploading a new song to my page. :) Woohoo! Look for Many more songs to now be added to the page. hmmm I will go add some now as a matter of fact. Then I have to start working on this search engine for you guys :) -Chris

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Hi guys... I'm back from Georgia. Well today I added some nice features. I have implemented a Maximum Line Display limit to some pages like "View All Poems" where it would display a TON of poems. Now it just displays up to 50 at a time. The same applies to the Uncritiqued Poems page. This should help people to load these pages much faster. I am going start working on a Search Engine for The Poetic Link now. We are starting to get so many poems that it would be nice to search on any word, title, name or phrase that you want to. I am not sure how exactly I want to do the search engine at the moment, but I will come up with something soon.

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Well I have added the visible score to NON-Active poems in the "View Your Poems" sections. This should make a lot of people happy. I have also added the poem links for the "Winners" so that when you display the winning Stats, you can directly view the poems posted there. This is a nice short-cut and a much needed addition. More to come... stay tuned. I am adding slowly but steadily :) -Chris

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Hi Guys. Well I'm out of town for this week. I will be back home Thursday evening. I will be sending out the Award Checks Friday probably. Sorry for the delay but life can be demanding. I am pleased to announce that I have raised the prize Awards this month. I will continue doing so EVERY Month as long as funding continues. I think that this new database design was the answer we were all looking for *Thank Goodness*! I will continue adding new features and little improvements to the page as we grow. I am currently working on implementing some better viewing of your personal poem pages. I would like for you guys to see how your other poems scored as long as it is past its active month. Take Care, -Chris

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Well today was busy. I did not have a lot of time to do much of anything here. I did receive a few ideas regarding my rating system. I am gathering your thoughts and ideas and will implement something nice and new when we roll into April. I am not sure if anyone got into chat tonight at 9pm but I was busy at the time so I am sorry I missed it. I hope that it becomes a popular evening event here. Let me know if you attended and how many showed up? Corrected a few ambiguous line items in some directions and worked on the personal information module. I hope to have this implemented soon. It is rather hard to decide on just what to allow and not to allow. If I allow pictures and music for everyone, we may get wayyyyy too many megs of info and that would be bad. But if I offer no pictures or music, it may just be boring *sigh* I am not sure what I want to do yet. I will sleep on it and dream some ideas up :) -Chris P.S. Does anyone ever read this? Mail me if you do *smile*

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Well I have made a lot of small but very important changes to the page in the past 3 days. Many of the things that I have added will only be evident by the rest of you after the 8th of April, when the March Winners are posted. I have been working on getting everything written so that a smooth transition can be made from the March to the April month. I am going to work on a routine that will allow people to move poems that they had previousely published on The Poetic Link, into the Database system. Advantages of doing this will be that their poems will be instantly accessible and searchable. I am not sure of all the small things that I will add, but suffice it to say that the database is already proving to be an increadible piece of technology for our poets. I hope that many of you choose to move any older poems you have on our system into the database.

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I made it more clear that we DO accept Cash, Check and Money orders as well as Credit Cards for our Poetry Submissions. Some people were thinking that only Credit Cards were acceptable payment but that is incorrect. I have made the links larger and easier to see. Guys, I am so excited that I will finally be able to start paying some REAL prizes here. For the month of March I am currently going to be giving away $170.00 in prizes. I may even increase that to $200.00. I really hope that next month it grows even more still. I would love to give away over $1,000.00 each month in prizes. Believe me when I say, if the page gets enough submissions that I can do awesome prizes like that... I most certainly will be! Time will tell :) -Chris

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Well we successfully transitioned over our first "mile-stone" of moving from March to April. The next "mile-stone" will be when we finish out the 7 remaining days until the March contest is completed and we move on to April's contest month. Any poems submitted now are of course put into April's pool, the 7 remaining days are merely to allow for critiquers to finish things out and to allow poets to reply to those critiques. I added a small request to the credit card screen, asking people to please plan ahead a bit and try to purchase several credits at once rather than just 1 each time. I get charged a FEE for every transaction so it will help me a bit. Also, you could be blocked from doing more than 3 or 4 identical transactions from any vendor in a 24 hour time period. When I tested it with my card, it let me do 4 purchases, and blocked the 5th. In such a case you would have to wait until the next day to buy more credits. Planning ahead and buying several credits at one time would keep you from being blocked and keep my fee's lower. -Chris

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Found a small bug with Poem Titles not accepting " characters properly. I have fixed it now so we should be ok. Some poems were showing up with really odd titles when they had " characters in them.

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