First I want to apologize to everyone who has tried to join my blogging event How Do I Love Thee Poetry Party. Being a new blogger comes with a learning curve that affects not only me but all of you, my readers as well. However, the problem IS fixed. It’s not the solution I have hoped for and I have requested more information from the web host to see if there is a better workaround for future poetry parties.

Thank you everyone for your patience in this matter, I have been having fun reading the entries that did go up before the meltdown and receiving all of your positive feedback. I want to give an individual shout-out to Jarrod who’s blog is The Haunted Lullaby for being the first to bring the problem to my attention and without frustration continued for several hours to get his poem submitted! Jarrod, your effort will remain with me, inspiring me to not give up when these blogging obstacles pop up and stick their tongues at at!

Okay, so here’s what happened:

Blogging 201 assignment: Make the Most of events. Okay, so finding events and participating in them was pretty easy and definitely fun. So I decided heck, I love events, let’s put one together (I mean, that’s how I will get the most from the assignment, right?) So I spend literally 5 hours creating my perfect event… the poetry party. I realized that most of the people I follow in my reader include poetry in some of their postings and a lot of people I follow are also relationship minded so I thought, heck, this will easily attract people (of course I forgot that just because I am following those people that does not mean that they are necessarily the people who are following me back!) LOL

Okay, so I got my party created. I posted about it and come midnight my event went live. I was super excited and couldn’t wait for morning to see how many poets I’d attracted. I woke up and immediately hopped on to discover I’d gotten my first bite… success!

And then nothing happened for more than 14 hours… WAHH!!!

But then it began, I got three more people all within about an hour of each other and a whole lot more interest and likes and comments on my post. One of my amazing party guests then asked me, “How do we vote?” Oh, my gosh, I had no idea! I hadn’t researched it enough to know the ins-and-outs of the programming, I was just so excited to get it up and going!

So I sent a help ticket in to the administrators and poked around on my own yesterday trying to figure it out. I did. Or at least I thought I did. There was a little section of my event creation form that asked what date voting should begin. That seemed like a dumb question to me, when my event goes live, duh! So I typed in the date and that was the end of that. I let her know how to vote and that you can only vote for one entrant (it’s in the coding) by clicking on the little heart showing on the person’s thumbnail.

And then I heard from Jarrod. I poked around some more to see if I could recreate the problem he was having so I could problem solve and help. I couldn’t seem to figure out why the link-up box wasn’t working (all you need to do is paste your poem’s link in the box, enter your email address and click submit.) Should have only taken a few seconds. Poor patient Jarrod, undetermined to give up he had a friend try… nope, nothing.

And now it is day 3 of my event which stands with 6 poems (one of them is mine and does not count for prizes). In the night, as I slept, others tried to upload and had the same problem as Jarrod.

But now I am pleased to report that the problem is FIXED. I received a response to that initial ticket I submitted to the site administrator — remember that ticket one asking how does a person vote… and part of Maria’s response was, “please take care on when the voting starts. As soon as the voting starts, the “add your link” button is removed. Voting then closes on “end date”.

And so I had my answer. I had, in trying to help my guest understand how to vote (and learning myself), disabled the ability for anyone to join my event. My apologies.

So, I have adjusted the settings.

You may now link-up!

Voting is disabled until the 18th. When voting begins no new submissions can be taken in. The event will end on the 20th. Winners will receive their door prizes and acknowledgment glory.

When you follow the link to my event page, you’ll see a list of the rules, followed by thumbnail images for each submission and beneath that is a blue button that says, “add link”.

I have to go to work now, but will return tonight to update my PAGE to reflect the newly ascertained information. I’m looking forward to seeing new additions to the event and following and tweeting your efforts!

Have fun and good luck!