User blog:George Dance/April 2012

April 2012 - The very first poem site we linked up to through our External Links section was the University of Toronto's Representative Poetry Online. Adding links to the hundreds of poets listed there took most of last November and December. In March, though (less than 6 months later), we discovered that RPO had changed its database, and none of our links worked; so we spent most of April redoing all of that work.

So that this work would also improve the wiki, though, we also began adding additional links, when available, to each of those entries from two other sites. One is PoemHunter -- a commercial link that turns out to have hundreds of poets listed, with many poems not available elsewhere on the web. The other is NNDB (the Notable Names Database), a site with entries on thousands of notable historical figures, including not a few poets. We also added Poetry Foundation links where available.

We also began adding pictures on a large scale for the first time. By the end of April, we had over 500 pictures on the wiki. While that was less than 10% of the articles on the wiki, it is probably the most visited 10%. The result was a substantially improved look for that part of PPP. George Dance 01:12, May 11, 2012 (UTC)