The Poddyland News

Several days ago I was starting to panic that with Hurricane Hanna headed towards South Florida, that the airports would be closed and I wouldn’t be able to head off to New York for the weekend. Now with Hanna fizzling out and having slowed down, it shouldn’t affect us here, so I am pretty sure the flight will leave ok tonight - however…

By the time we are set to come back on Monday afternoon, the monster storm of the season, Hurricane Ike, already a Category 4 while way out in the Atlantic, could either be here or close to being here. I am hoping it misses Florida completely, but if it does hit, it would be nice to be able to get home first. I don’t trust the bedroom windows, and I would prefer to be at home if only to take plenty of video as things blow around - if it does hit us. I would really not want to get stuck in New York with the airports closed - that has to be a really miserable experience.

Nothing much has changed with my lens traffic this week, up slightly, but what has changed is the traffic to one of the jokes on my main web site (So You Think You Had A Bad Day) that has been picked up by Stumbleupon. I had 11,000 visitors to my site yesterday, from 87 Countries, and from all 50 States in the USA. That’s the good news… The bad news - hardly a click on the rotating CJ banner on the main joke page that got hit, and under $3 on Adsense. What a shame - if only I could find a way to capitalize on the traffic…

I’m struggling to keep up with the things that I want to do, just not enough hours in the day unfortunately. For those of you with lenses that I have promised to visit, I have close to 100 lenses marked that I will get around to as soon as I can. The list is growing, but unless I have actually visited a lens, the link isn’t going to go away.

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 9
Top 10,000: 4
Lenses: 66

MY TOP 5 LENSES
Poddys Lensography
My Claim To Fame
The Daily Joke - April 2008
The Daily Joke Lensography
My Pet Peeves

Sometimes I think I would like to live a life that was more ordinary, but instead for no good reason, my life has to be complicated.

I hate buying or selling a house, a car, or booking a holiday, because through no fault of my own, something always goes wrong. In some ways the things that go wrong actually turn out for the best, but it’s really weird the way that things happen.

And so we come to the tale of last night’s strange coincidences…

My girlfriend and I booked to go to New York this weekend (we fly tomorrow evening - provided Tropical Storm Hanna doesn’t close the airport. That’s another story - I’m already concerned about that…). So thinking last night that we ought to get all our papers ready, I found the papers for the hotel reservation, but I could not find any for the flight booking.

I started to panic - just slightly, when I checked my emails and couldn’t find a confirmation anywhere.

So, I tried to log into the airline web site - it wouldn’t accept any of my usual email addresses. Bigger panic… But it’s ok - I am sure that I had seen the charge go through on my credit card - so let’s look that up online.

Ok, log into my credit card account, but no details, only a message in RED to say that my account is suspended and to call the bank.

I call the bank, spoke to a lady who had a wonderful accent - wonderful if you didn’t need to understand everything she said and for her to understand you, but this is the second time in less than a week I have had to deal with a problem on the phone and had either a latin or indian lady with a really strong accent. Not strong enough for me to identify exactly where she was from, but definitely strong enough to make it hard to understand everything that she was saying.

Seems that there had been a number of transactions on my card yesterday, none of which were mine. So, they closed the account, and she said that they would send me a replacement card in 5-7 business days. BUT WAIT - I’m off to NEW YORK in TWO DAYS! She said that I could pay $16 to have it express mailed, so I flapped and did my best to give her a mental picture of me flapping up and down, threatening to give up using the card, and they said that they would send it out free - Phew! - but it still might not get here in time of course…

Called the airline, they confirmed my flight was ok, gave me the confirmation number, and said that there had been a computer glitch at the time when I made the booking.

So now I have my flight booking confirmed and printed out, a new credit card on the way, and the really good news, if you can call it that, is that if I didn’t have the flight confirmation problem because of the airline computer glitch, I probably wouldn’t have found out that I had a problem with the credit card, and would have gone to New York with only 1 credit card which I would have found out had been cancelled. Now that would have been a real mess…

So now I still have to hope that Hanna doesn’t blow in too fast and too close to South Florida and close the airport, and also have to update all my auto payments, which are set to use my cancelled credit card.

I just wonder - WHY ME? Why can’t things just run smoothly for a change? Why does life have to keep throwing me curveballs all the time?

I could add in the story of trying to update my 8 year old cell phone last week, which is equally complicated, but I think this is the point at which I am about to lose your attention, and so Adieu from me before something else goes wrong - like a power cut at the point where I am about to press the PUBLISH button…

—– UPDATE —–

Well it must have been a gang that compromised my credit card somehow, since yesterday there were 10 purchases made in 2 Walmart stores in Central Florida for $200 or over each time - over $2,000!

Hanna seems to be slowing down and also moving further east, so with luck it will be too far away and too weak to affect our flight tomorrow afternoon.

Just a quick update for today as I am busy…

The lens rankings took until about 2pm (EST) to update, some surprises as about a dozen of my lenses have had better than normal traffic in the last 2 days, but not all of them went up in rank.  I think traffic outside of Squidoo doesn’t always count as high as traffic from inside.  But over half of my Top 40 lenses went up rather than down at least.

I now have 2 lenses perched to leap into the Top 2,000, and several about to reach the Top 10,000, so things aren’t looking too shabby, definitely better than they were a few days ago.  I think an angel might be responsible for one of the lenses rising, not sure about the rest though.  But blessings are always welcomed here

In the Lounge my thread on the Agonies of waiting for the lensrank to update has taken off today, with lots of silly song lyrics coming in, as well as photos.  So don’t forget to check there in the Chatter Room and come up with some entries yourself.

LENS STATUS
Top 100       0
Top 2,000    9
Top 10,000   5
Lenses 66

I mentioned in my blog yesterday that I am looking to create a lens about what people do while they are waiting for the lensrank to update, since it’s taking longer and longer, and yesterday it was mid-afternoon (in the Eastern USA) when the updates finally occurred.

I initially thought that it would be great if people could send in a candid photo of themselves (or just a funny photo) plus a short caption describing what they did while waiting for the lensrank to update.

A am now going to add a second section to the lens - Song Lyrics!  Rock The Ice said in the forum yesterday that he hoped the rankings didn’t update, because last time it updated late on a Wednesday his rankings plumetted.   That got me humming the song I Don’t Like Mondays by The Boomtown Rats and changing the lyrics to I Don’t Like Wednesdays.   Rock is going to work on some new lyrics to fit his mood.  So please - think about what you do while waiting for the lens rankings to update, come up with a song to go with it, and post the lyrics to ohtheagony@poddys.com

The pictures and song lyrics will be added to the lens for everyone to vote on, and I will add links for each of the lensmasters that contribute back to their profile on Squidoo, so everyone wins - me hopefully for creating a popular fun lens and all the contributors for the additional publicity.

So come on - get creative - take some funny photos - think up some good lyrics - and let’s get this lens rolling…

It looks like only one of my posts from yesterday made it to the front page of Squidtop, Favorite Lensmasters - Debnet.  

I am not sure what happened to the previous one, maybe only your latest post gets added to the front page, but it did contain a few tips for using Squidtop, features of Wordpress that some of you might not be familiar with.   In case you missed it, and I suspect everyone did, Here Is The Link

It took forever for the lens rankings to update today, and during a discussion in the Lensmaster Lounge I had an idea to create a lens about what we do while we are waiting for the lens rankings to update.  It’s not only the change in rank that takes place, it’s the giving of the Green Light to new lenses, so it’s important to us all.   Do we tap our feet, pace up and down, tear our hair out, or what? 

If you would like to contribute to my lens, I need from you a brief description of what you do while waiting for the lens rankings to update, plus a candid photo to go along with it.  The details of how to submit your entry for the lens are in This Thread.

Meantime, the rankings did update finally early this afternoon, and here is my current status.

LENS STATUS
Top 100        0
Top 2,000     9
Top 10,000   4
Lenses         60

Debnet (Debbie) lives in the south of England & works in education.   She had planned to take a year off  to spend in Florida, but the plan has now changed, so she can only stay for two and a half months until the end of October.

She enjoys writing about the funny things that kids say and do and about her experiences of working in schools.  However, she keeps having brain wave ideas for different lenses and hasn’t got round to those yet.

Debbie is hoping eventually to have a mix of lenses, some more serious tied to education issues and others more light hearted.

She enjoys watching F1 Grand Prix racing, most kinds of music, watching tv, especially Big Brother, researching her family tree, spending time at the beach, food and so much more.

I hope you will find time to visit her lenses.   These are her top performing lenses, one of which made Lens Of The Day several weeks ago.

Fish And Chips
Selective Mutism
Sacred Spirit
Cornish Pasties
Social Stories
The Worst Gifts I Ever Received
Only Fools And Horses
Wonderbra

As well as posting blog entries to your Squidtop blog, did you know that you can create pages in Wordpress as well?

I already had an About page, but today I added several more pages with links to Surveys where you can sign up to earn money by completing surveys, Savings with links to good places to save on web hosting and electronics etc, and finally a page with links to all of my Song Lyrics lenses.

You can see a list of the pages that I have created along the top of the page, as well as in the Pages Index in the sidebar.  I think the list along the top looks good - a nice feature about this particular Wordpress Template.

So if you think this could be useful to you, why not create your own pages and generate more backlinks for your lenses.

What a busy week!   Not just work, but going out with my girlfriend, booking a long weekend in New York, and of course spending time at the beach over the weekend.

Friday evening I got my hair cut, and for the first time in 15 years I didn’t color it, so now I have sides that are silvery with still some streaks of brown, but by the time the next cut comes around I might look like a short haired Santa.  Oh well… At least I still have my hair…

Unlike last weekend, which saw Tropical Storm Fay approaching, this weekend was gorgeous.  Saturday there was a whispy high cloud cover that kept the brightness of the sun down a bit and also the temperature, and the occasional darker cloud that blew past and cooled things off for a few minutes, so almost perfect at the beach.   

Sunday the weather was practically perfect too, with almost no clouds, a very calm sea, and the beach was really busy.    Both of us love to people watch, and there is always someone doing something to attract your attention. 

Sunday we got down to the beach when the tide was at it’s lowest, so it was interesting to watch people come and lay out chairs, towels, coolers etc on the flat area close to the ocean, when we knew within a couple of hours the waves would be gradually coming closer, and it only takes a boat to go past for a bigger wave to surge in and send people into panic mode.  We must have spend over an hour watching various groups of people struggle to salvage flip-flops as they kept attempting to go on boat trips, it was a good time.

Saturday night we went out to a Brazilian restaurant, where they being the meat to the table on skewers and it just keeps coming.  The restaurant was great, but my girlfriend doesn’t handle red meat too well.  She does as long as it’s not red - but the sight of blood soon had her feeling queasy.  Shame, as it was a good meal otherwise, and the appetizer/salad bar was also very good.

Well I did manage to find time to make some minor tweaks to my lenses, and the benefits have paid off a bit, with several of them now back into the top tier.  But I am still short of 10 hours a week that I need to spend on them to really turn things around. 

It gets frustrating at times, and I am sure I am not the only one to think this, but I see some Lenses Of The Day and think to myself “I have lenses as good as that”, and in some cases the lenses haven’t had a lot of content either.  Maybe my time will come, but for now I think I will have to be content with having a few in the top 2,000…  Money is more important right now than fame…

I am still struggling to earn a lot, other than through Adsense.  My earnings for the month are now close to my all time high, but in real terms this is only averaging $1.50 a day - not enough to get me very far!  But it’s progress at least.  I hope September and october see a continued improvement in the earnings.

Well here is my sad lens status… 
Hopefully I can improve on this next week.

LENS STATUS
Top 100         0
Top 2,000      8
Top 10,000    6
Lenses         60

Very sad ranking updates for today - another lens drops out of the Top 2,000.

A week ago I had 11 lenses in the Top 2,000 and 5 in the Top 10,000.  Now I have only 4 in the Top 2,000 and 9 in the Top 10,000.  That’s a potential loss of close to $50 in the payout - ouch!   It shows how important it is to keep promoting and updating your lenses, and I have had little chance to do either in the last week.   I desperately need to do something, yet this weekend is already going to require more time than I have for essential things.

It’s going to be a busy weekend for sure.   I have to get my hair cut, go grocery shopping, see my daughters, plan a trip to New York that was to have been next Spring but now has to be done early September, get a new cell phone (mine is 8 years old and the case has to be held on with a rubber band to stop the phone falling out - embarrassing but the phone works ok though - just can’t get a case - it’s time to upgrade), research and shop for a new camcorder (can’t go to New York without one).   So a very full weekend, and in addition I need to spend time enjoying the 8 weeks I have left with my girlfriend here :)    I have a funny feeling my lenses are going to suffer further unfortunately.  The August payout in 2 months will be horrible I am sure. 

Well as usual no money from CJ or Amazon, and I still have to earn 1c on affiliate links on my lenses, but it does look as if Adsense might break records with amost $30 this month so far.  I hope as the year continues I can continue the upward trend on Adsense.

LENS STATUS
Top      100      0
Top   2,000      4
Top 10,000      9

I didn’t get a chance to update my lenses yesterday, had a nice evening with my honey, a nice meal ready when I came home, then went out shopping, then laid in bed and watched the Olympics while munching on popcorn.  It doesn’t get much better than that

While waiting for the lenses to update, I completed a couple of surveys though.   I do them with 3 different companies, but I have found that Opinion Outpost is the best since it pays real money.  eRewards seems like it pays good, but 2 out of every 3 surveys I try to complete tell me that I am not qualified, and when I try to cash the rewards, there is nothing other than Borders to really buy.  They mostly only offer vouchers for 10% off products, which is not real money.

Opinion Outpost though has worked out good.  They will send you a check, and it’s real money.   And you get paid for referring people as well.   If you have some spare time, please take a look…