Madness 3.0 🎉

Absence makes a site grow stronger

Madness! Poetry began in 2012 on what was essentially a self-dare. I had just launched my then-website, Think, Kid, Think!, weeks before, and was eager to connect with people in the poetry community, so I wrote a blog post about how fun it would be (in theory) to host a college basketball-style tournament among kids’ poets. The post went viral, and within a few weeks 64 poets had lined up to participate in an event that I had no idea how to produce (in reality). Yada yada yada, with the aid of a few Wordpress plugins, a very large dictionary, and an intravenous caffeine drip, I somehow pulled it off.

That was Madness 1.0 — a happy accident.

The next few seasons followed the same pattern. From 2013-2015, I implemented a few changes to the contest rules, and automated a process or two, but most of the work of running the event remained 100% manual behind the scenes.

When it came time to prepare for the 2016 event, I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it the same way another year. My family and I had just moved to California and I was working long startup hours. I had recently begun experimenting with a new software platform that I believed could become the new backbone of the event, but I wasn’t ready to built it. So as much as it pained me, as a matter of human survival, I cancelled the 2016 event. But over the course of the year, I committed to build as much as I could in my spare time, and by the time the calendar flipped to 2017 I had accomplished enough to confidently re-launch the event while building the rest on-the-fly. Though pretty “hacky” as software goes, everything worked like a dream on the front end compared to before, including automatically organizing authletes’ poems (⬇🤯), automatically ensuring each poem’s compliance with the rules (⬇😡), and automatically structuring each match page for reading and voting (⬆💤).

That was Madness 2.0 — a monumental achievement.

Since then, I have implemented several more rules changes and tried to bolt on a few new features, but for the most part the site that I built haphazardly in 2017 is the same one that went on to publish 500+ more poems from 2018-2021. With each passing year, however, I began noticing more and more about the site design that I didn’t like, I found myself still struggling to administer pretty basic things on the back end, and I continued to answer the same questions and respond to the same complaints due to the same user experience problems that plagued the site from the beginning.

So as 2022 approached, I decided I would update at least a few key components of the site. I started with one of the most basic — the header that sits atop each page — but once I changed that, I felt the need to change another component to match it, and then another, and another, and soon I felt it necessary to change … everything. But “everything” proved too much. January soon passed, then February, and though by mid-March 2022 I had made a ton of progress, it still felt only half-finished at best, so once again I made the painful decision to cancel Madness! Poetry 2022 rather than try to run it “the old way” yet another year.

So here we are, in early 2023, and I’ve again had the better part of a year to try to complete my overhaul of the app. Similar to 2017, I feel good about what I’ve achieved, and even though it’s not 100% done (let’s go with 85%), it’s close enough that I’m confident I can host a successful event. I’m still nervous about the usual things — that I won’t have enough time to administer things properly, that the site will break down, that a nefarious user will find a novel way to manipulate the vote, that I won’t be able to get enough teachers to register their classrooms, etc. — but I’m also very excited , because the improvements I’ve been making are designed to address all of these challenges, and more!

Here is a quick list of site improvements since the 2021 event, touching just about every aspect of the user experience:

• 🕶 Complete visual redesign including responsive page layouts

• 🧭 More intuitive navigation and menus to help people find their way around

• ✅ Easier registration and login flows

• 🗄 Personalized dashboards for every user type

• 🗳 Individual student voting within their classrooms

• 🔪 All voters can now split their vote any way they want (except 50/50 🤣)

• ⏱ The return of the countdown clock!

• ⚙️ Plus lots of new admin features to make things easier for me to manage

👆 This is Madness 3.0 — my labor of love. ❤️

Thank you for being part of this journey with me. I know this event means a lot to a lot of people, and I hate to think of what we might have missed during our two “lost years”, but in both cases the time off gave me a chance to re-assess, re-focus, and re-energize, and eventually re-emerge with a more personally sustainable and collectively superior experience. Enjoy the madness! 🚀

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By the way, THIS is also the official new communication channel of Madness! Poetry. Here we will share news, stories, highlights, polls, and opportunities related to the tournament and other Madness! happenings, and more broadly to poetry and children’s/YA literature at large.

We will start simple, and slow — and completely free — and see where it goes.

🙏 PLEASE SUBSCRIBE NOW to be notified of all future communications from this channel. Thank you!