Sure thing. I just sent an invite to the Gmail address included with your comment.

Peter, on the latest version of WordPress Comments Reloaded, which appeared subsequent to my publishing this post, “double opt-in is only required once, users with at least one active subscription will automatically get approved,” according to the changelog.

I too love LOVE the new distraction free post screen in the new WP version. I usually compose on a word processor and then copy it to the blog for just that reason. WP never ceases to amaze me, and with each new version I tend to fall in love not just with WP but with blogging all over again.

I got an invite for Google+ recently too, thought, I’m a bit pressed for time right now and haven’t tried it out. I agree with you that a FB for adults would be nice, but I already feel spread too thin in the social network world. Still, you’ve got me more curious to check it out…

Hello Erin, and thanks for your enthusiasm! Odd as it seems, I still haven’t lost my own excitement about blogging even after all these years — in fact, I still regularly have to restrain myself from starting new sites. Anyway, I’m not sure how many G+ invites I have but they keep telling me I have some, so I’ll send one along to the email address you used here and hope you can get in.

Thanks so much for your work for poetry!

Thank you! I think it’s a beautiful book; the cover art is fantastic. I can say that because I was a passive receiver of that gift. Otherwise, I hope the poems are somewhere in the neighborhood with the looks.

And yes, I do find FB valuable for giving me a portrait of some folk who were otherwise just names. I’m not about to give it up. But it would be nice if those lists actually worked.

Good, I’m glad this helped convince you not to neglect the blog! Summers are always a hard time to get people to read, especially anything a bit challenging, such as poetry or reviews thereof.

Yes, I should’ve made it clear that it’s the sheer size of my contacts list on FB that gives me trouble. That’s why I wanted the lists feature to work as advertised — it’s the only way to make the feed usable, even after blocking updates from every game and application. Some people of course respond by radically pruning back their friends list, but if I did that it would defeat my main purpose for being there: to get to know people I don’t know very well (with an eye to finding new contributors or editors for qarrtsiluni, new hosts for the Festival of the Trees, new videopoets for Moving Poems, etc.). Theoretically LinkedIn would be a better tool for that kind of networking, but it doesn’t seem to be the way most people are using it, and besides, that’s a damn boring site — it’s all about me me me.

Glad to hear you haven’t been neglecting the long-form poetry. I finally got around to ordering Weaving a New Eden and have been enjoying it very much.

Thanks for the push. I saw the link to that slideshow the otehr day but didn’t click on it. I do think Google is trying to force data openness on Facebook, among other things. As you may know, the two companies have fighting bitterly over the fact that Facebook encourages people to share their Google/Gmail contact information in order to find more friends on Facebook, but won’t let Google users have access to their Facebook data.