poem ranker is a conglomeration of ideas, a side project, and an experiment. The concept came from a cross between imaginaries.org (an online writers' workshop) and RankPeople and Hot or Not (formerly AmIHotOrNot). Kaolin was intrigued by the voyeuristic and exhibitionistic aspects and wanted to contribute something -- something perhaps a little more tasteful (and different -- there are enough sites for ranking how people look at this point).

Kaolin Fire is a conglomeration of ideas, side projects, and experiments. He's a sick puppy who apparently likes to do jsps and c in his spare time, and Really enjoys talking in the third person. He runs his own server and uses vi to write his code/webpages. More than you want to know about him can be learned at erif.org

He'd also like you to check out some of his other sites, such as writer's planner, a site for tracking and planning submissions, or... well, really, that's top at the moment.

Site stats:

	Style	Poems	Votes	Average
	Free verse	14554	101800	5.70
	Haiku	1063	10931	5.35
	Lyric	1272	12028	5.83
	Limerick	258	3421	4.93
	Ode	450	4546	6.22
	Concrete	82	984	5.74
	Other	1433	9828	5.75
	Sonnet	222	2213	6.11
	Villanelle	109	1347	6.76
	Sestina	21	222	6.40
	Pimple	140	1367	6.40
	Meta-Ku	11	103	6.07
	Acrostic	38	540	6.32
	Triolet	12	124	6.65
	Ghazal	16	128	6.59
	Glosa	11	67	6.79
	Programming	16	109	5.52
	Cinquain	13	78	5.90
	Terza Rima	12	160	6.52
	Prose Poem	126	711	6.43
	Senryu	95	346	5.77
		19954	151053	5.72

Voting histogram:

Graph Votes 10  21945 15577 9  9947 2741 8  12119 2845 7  10486 2761 6  6865 2892 5  5988 2852 4  4383 2267 3  3495 1973 2  3223 1958 1  3355 2419 0  22998 7964

Viewing stats: (since Feb 1, 2003)

		Views
	users looking at specific pieces	131495
	anonymous folks looking at specific pieces	2905129
	users looking at random pieces	26799
	anonymous folks looking at random pieces	177933

Bulletins/announcements: No bulletins found

Other places you might be interested to dally:

WhatPoem? -- what type of poem are YOU?

just to follow the craze...

Writer's Planner -- plan and track submissions

This is first and foremost to help you keep track of what you’ve sent where, and where you plan to send what next after the near-inevitable rejection. If you never have that problem, never fear! Well, beyond the rest of us writers tracking you down to blend your gray matter into a nice smoothie--you could also use the site to track where you intend to send something once you’re done writing it. Or done editing it, you poor, poor sod.

Skwerms -- aka TheListSite.com

Free for any use (not abuse). A hierarchical todo list site thing.

Rockmage -- Free animal patterns

And art. The art's not free except to look at. :)

imaginaries -- writer's cooperative

"We are a global writers' co-operative for science fiction, fantasy, and horror who work together to improve each-other's writing by sharing works, ideas, news, and criticism. Membership is open to anyone interested in participating in this process."

bush/putin -- a short manifesto

"Because every governmental and religious entity believes that only their constituents are people and therefore accorded rights and protections provided by said entities, WE NEED an entity that provides all individuals with the same rights and protections."

Publicity! :whee:

04/15/2004

BellaOnline adds us to their list of Writing:Poetry Resources-- "Rank the works of others on a 1-10 scale or submit your own poems for ranking."

02/09/2004

"[BrambleStory has] high hopes [it] can attract better poetry than poemranker, but can only marvel at the ingenuity and scale of the Poemranker experience." :preens: Ingenuity and scale. :) BrambleStory "is an exciting new site for writers" with "a couple of sections", including "an innovative group writing project", "a place to post poems or short stories, and get feedback on them," "writing exercises to warm up and inspire you", and "more than 450 creative writing links" (including Poem Ranker).

12/16/2002

"Judgy's Chamber", a phpbb, found me. Seems as good a place as any to discuss poemranker's merits and flaws, given that they're sure I can't be up to any good. :/ Yes, things *are* slow around here, why do you ask? ;)

12/16/2002

Just for good measure, here's an Israeli site linking poemranker in Hebrew. A friend translates this as "People post their songs to this web-community. Rank the songs, and join the forum." Hmm. No slander? No hate mail? What's the world coming to?

10/08/2002

"Around Carolina" appears to have put me on their web guide. They asked me if they could some three or four months ago, but never got back to me. They said they'd let me know... ah well, that's what webalizer is for. :) There doesn't appear to be a "history" of the web guide, so I'll quote them here: "Well what do you get when you cross a rating site with a compilation of poems? The great PoemRanker, where you can read poetry and rate the wanna-be Bard." Can you tell life has been a bit slow around here? Steve Wright's site remains a winner, as does yahoo.

08/05/2002

William Porter wrote for The Denver Post a short jot: "[...] sort of a cyber-slam for folks too shy to hop on the stage at their local coffee shop." I'm going to have to use that somewhere/somehow. :)

07/22/2002

BBC Radio 2! On "Steve Wright in the afternoon". If anyone can find a transcript and/or mp3 of this, I'd be *much* appreciative! =) I've found so far: Miles Mendoza's Website of the Day -- an archival link of this would be nicer, so that the link is still valid in 5 days. (The best known example of web users rating or ranking things is Am I Hot or Not, but there's also Goth or Not, Geek or Not, Electable or Not and even Rate My Mullet. So hats off to Poem Ranker for coming up with a more cerebral, literary use for a site which ranks things!)

07/18/2002

The Guardian wrote an article lambasting poemranker on the 18th of may 2002 (TheEditor, really... a separate part of the guardian... page 20, _The week on the net_). Well, two months to the day later I'm mentioned again... this time it's just a link on their "Web watch" down at the very bottom. ("New & noted") An alternate link if the other one dies for some reason. Or something.

07/12/2002

I'm making the daily circuit, apparently. I was Site Van De Dag (site of the day?) 12 Juli 2002 at planet internet -- if anyone knows where the "old" links of this is so I can link to the specific day, that would be appreciated -- I can't really navigate the language...

07/11/2002

This I just don't understand, but it's boosted my traffic again. The Daily Bikini has me up near the top of their site. It looks like they've nabbed some subset of yahooo's daily picks, but I'm not going to knock it. :) (Actually, it looks like thedaily.com has a cpuple of dailies... same site, different picture every day. I'm also getting a fair number of hits from The Daily Overlook... (The site is now listed on the bikini's previously featured sites)

07/07/2002

Yahoo! Picks has had the most flattering (least unflattering?) things to say about me yet. And they've definitely thrown more traffic my way than I've had before. This is great/amazing/cool, and tells me I really need to feed some fixes onto the site to make it run more smoothly before everything grinds to a halt...

07/03/2002

Yahoo found me. Until now, I'd been getting the majority of hits from google as a general search engine, and some fraction from yahoo as a general search engine. Today I turned around and noticed that Yahoo (or someone) had lasted me in two categories, and I've been getting impressively many hits from those: Arts/Humanities/Literature/Poetry and Entertainment/Contests__Surveys__and_Polls/Polls/X_or_Not/. cool. :)

05/13/2002, 4:34am PST

USA TODAY -- "hip clicks" -- doesn't say much about poemranker, but it doesn't say much about anything.

05/10/2002, 6:51am PST

MetaFilter -- basically, some people think it sucks, and some people think it's cool AND sucks. But that's cool! =) From 200 hits a day to 2000+, and some 30-odd new users. Hopefully they'll stick around and help make the site more interesting. (and stop just saying everything sucks their balls). But such is life. =)

05/09/2002, 11:51am PST

kuro5hin -- a nice article and discussion on poetry where poemranker gets mentioned at near the bottom in a comment ("HotOrNot for literati") ... a lot of people came here from that link. =)

Archive of poemranker look-and-feel
Thanks to The Wayback Machine!

07/08/2001

This isn't the first design, but it's the first one the wayback machine found. Ugly, yes! Would you believe the "complaints" link didn't work, even back then? ;) A cute little javascript alert saying that it wasn't yet implemented. The text is hard to read, the colors quite horrific, and yet... that's where it all came from. The suggestions link (not sure how long _that'll_ survive, I'm not going to bother copying it, is essentially cribbed from erif.org's guestbook. From "way back when". You fill in your name, email, webpage, and suggestion. There are three comments from Mark Bonica (helpful ones), and one note from Shar. Mark's comments go back to June 10, 2001, which means I probably got the first prototype together early that month or late may. Site stats had 92 poems, 28 users, 151 comments. comments and votes were tightly tied together, and you could see what vote a person commenting had given. Back then the curve was around the 6, though the characteristic spikes around 10 and 0 were already in evidence.

07/20/2001

A few minor changes to layout; notably, where the "view styles" and "send to friend" are, the background of the voting box, and the menu's "poem ranker" has been removed, because that's prominent enough in the logo. Amazingly enough, I'm still using the same logo; the same exact graphic. There's just a lot _less_ of that grey elsewhere. ;)

12/03/2001

Color scheme moved around a tad more significantly. I think this was after the first database loss. Or perhaps it was just during some sort of problems--but there's -1 poems, -1 users, -1 suggestions, -1 comments, 0 votes, 0 list subscribers... nothing exists. Odd.

10/01/2002

This is a first glimpse of the 'second' version of the site. It was all set oddly to 600 pixels or so, but not much has changed other than extending the sides out to make it more freeform, and adding lots more options. 'Complaints' still doesn't work, and it's still a javascript 'alert'.

04/01/2003

And this is with everything extended out, slightly, but just ever so slightly cleaner all around. Most of the changes, again, being behind the scenes. And so it stands, essentially.