This is just a quick heads up to let everyone know that comments have been temporarily disabled on all posts. This is to eliminate comment spam and reduce the amount of time that is required to police the site, until we have figured out a better monitoring system.

I think that comments are a great way to express your thoughts on a particular subject in an open forum. However, many blogs (including this one) have had to moderate comments because of how pervasive spam comments are. Comments have become a burden to me (as webmaster) and Jesse (as blogger), because of the time needed to make sure that spam bots aren’t playing our system.

Many blogs offer comments because of traffic benefits and for the community — thre reason that we’ve kept them alive until now. As a content publisher and blog reader, I have mixed feelings. As a reader, I like comments because I can commment on what I’m reading. However, as a publisher, it can take time to approve or delete comments as well as respond to them.

Lately, however, both Jesse and I need to concentrate on getting several books to print! Truthfully, we should have done this sooner but decided against it as many of the older articles invited comments. However, after a recent spate of comment spam we have decided to go ahead with it. Please let us know if you have any problems or concerns with this. Thank you for your understanding!

Thought this might be interesting to our readers—what with Jesse contributing so much good work on poets and movements in Wikipedia.

The above graphic, courtesy Nikola Smolenski, illustrates the physical size of the English edition of Wikipedia. Using volumes 25cm high and 5cm thick (some 400 pages), each page having two columns, each columns having 80 rows, and each row having 50 characters. Note that this is a conservative estimate, as it doesn’t include images, tables etc. which take up more surface than the text which describes them.

Check it out here.

I just received word that Dru Stroud/ Ryu Makoto suffered a massive stroke on June 25th and is now in a coma at UC Medical Center ICU, San Francisco. Dru is a fine poet and a great guy. Keep him in your prayers. Friends may contact me back-channel for more information. Jess