The Poddyland News

Hope you all had a good weekend.

Mine wasn’t bad, it wasn’t wonderful, but not bad overall. Both Saturday and Sunday it was mostly overcast, with rain showers Saturday morning, and a Monsoon Sunday evening. Still, we managed to spend Sunday afternoon at the beach, and it was nice to not get fried for a change. The sun did peek through on occasions, but the cloud cover was probably 80% most of the time. Still, when the temperature is in the mid-80’s you don’t worry too much…

Both Debbie and I were busy working on our joint New York lens. It’s coming along, zooming up the rankings, but traffic is still very light. We hope that with New York being a popular topic and with putting everything we have into this that we can get it up to the top, keep it at the top and maybe even get a Lens Of The Day to share between us.

I do admit to getting jealous at times, not having had any of my lenses get Lens Of The Day yet, and some picks recently haven’t (IMHO) been lenses that took a lot of effort to create. I would rather see the award go to lenses where the lensmaster has obviously put a lot of effort into making the lens something special, and there are a lot of exceptional lenses out there, rather than seeing one of the ordinary lenses get this coverted award.

So since the shake-up in the lens rank formula last week my lenses continue to slide down the ratings, despite editing and in some cases an increase in traffic. I am getting despondant at the thought of having a much lower earning for this month, with my affiliate income being trivial, with the exception of Adsense, where I expect a record $50. I wish I could figure out where my earnings were coming from on Adsense, since in the last 2 weeks I keep getting clicks that are worth almost $1 each. I’m only getting 4 or 5 of them a day, but if I could figure out which ones, I would promote the heck out of the pages the adverts were displayed on. CJ isn’t bringing much in, Amazon nothing, but Adsense is starting to work. I need a lot more than $50 a month for it to make a difference to my lifestyle though…

One other affiliate program that you might like to try is Opinion Outpost. It’s a survey company that does actually pay you in REAL MONEY! As always you earn more by referring people, but the surveys are genuine, and the earnings are coming in, slowly but surely. There is a banner at the bottom of this message if you would like to take a look at them.

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 6
Top 10,000: 5
Lenses: 67

NEW LENSES
The Daily Joke September 2008
New York City Break

MY TOP 5 LENSES
My Pet Peeves
The Daily Joke September 2008
Bournemouth
My Lensography
Poddys Lensography

I am sitting her at 9am waiting for the rankings to update. My lens The Daily Joke September 2008 had 27 visitors 3 days ago, 147 the next day, and 93 yesterday. The lensrank yesterday was 1,137 so I’m anxiously waiting to see if it can get close to the Top 100 today. It was my 3rd place lens yesterday, I’m sure it will be my top ranked lens today, after just 4 days. Maybe, just maybe, it’s Lens Of The Day quality…

** SHOCK HORROR OMG **
It’s 10am and the lens rank updated, but not good news at all! Although the September Jokes went from 1,137 to 575 in rank, most of my other lense plummetted by up to 10,000 places. Despite an increase in traffic, my Daily Joke Lensography went down almost 1,200 places. They must have changed the formula for lens rank, and I’m not liking it at all. Yesterday I had 9 Top Tier and 5 Second Tier, today only 4 Top Tier and 8 Second Tier, and most of my top lenses have had increased traffic the last 2 days.

Yesterday was a tough one at work for me, and also hard on Debbie, since it rained on and off most of the day, and she was stuck in the condo. No going to the pool, no chatting to the old folks who have been residents for years and years, just stuck indoors on her lonesome. She can chat to family and friends back in England of course, has the internet and television for entertainment, but sometimes it’s not enough - you just need to get outside and be around other people.

So last night we went out to eat at one of our favorite places, Sweet Tomatoes. For those of you who don’t have one of these locally, it’s a buffet restaurant with a huge (and I mean humongous) salad bar, with just about every type of vegetable you can imagine. They also have 8 types of soup, all home made, home baked breads and focaccia, pasta, baked potatoes and sweet potatoes, rice, and the best muffins ever, not to mention chocolate lava cake… Also fresh fruit, frozen yoghurt etc… With a buy 1 with 2 drinks and get 1 free coupon, the whole meal the the two of us cost just $15.09. The quality of the food is excellent, and since we both love soup and salads, it’s a great place for us to eat.

We then drove to another local outdoor mall and wandered around the Dollar Store for a while. Not so much to actually shop, but to see what’s there. Although a lot of the merchandise in Dollar Stores is low quality, sometimes you find a gem of an item, and last night it was Christmas Gift Bags. Really nice bags, large ones too, for just $1 each. So Debbie was happy, managed to get a few of these, and we got a bit of a walk in to work our meal off (because the chocolate lava cake is magical - it calls to you… and so do the muffins…).

Back then to the condo, where we spent a couple of hours catching up on email and tweaking lenses. I added some more photos to our joint New York City Break lens, which although it has been published for close to a week has only had 4 vsitors so far, and 2 of them have been US! It’s still not completed, might take another week for me to add all of my sections, and to add other links etc, but we both think it’s starting to look pretty good and we hope it makes a good read. Well there it is - out of wraps now, the link is there if you would like to take a sneak peek!

Today looks like a wet one as well, so more lens work no doubt, but tonight is also the start of one of my favorite shows, Survivor, so we may have to spend an hour tonight glued to the television for a change. My two favorite shows, Survivor and The Amazing Race will be on as from this week, and I usually try not to miss an episode, but with Debbie only here for 4 more weeks, television will be playing second fiddle this season. Fortunately she likes the shows too, and they don’t show them in England any more.

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 4
Top 10,000: 8
Lenses: 67

NEW LENSES
The Daily Joke September 2008

MY TOP 5 LENSES
My Pet Peeves
The Daily Joke September 2008
My Lensography
Bournemouth
Religious Jokes

I couldn’t believe it when I saw the rankings just now. 2 days ago after I first published it, The Daily Joke September 2008 was ranked 119,461. Yesterday it was 6,509, and today it’s 1,137! It’s now my 3rd place lens in just 3 days!

I hope you will pay a visit to this lens, if you haven’t already, and if you have any lenses related to dogs, please feel free to add them to the lens. Why dogs you ask? Well the lens is full of funny dog pictures, some of which have never been published before. So drop by please and take a peek (no not a “peke” dear - we aren’t giving away free dogs…).

This lens has had almost 200 visitors since it was published, partly due to my friends at Tagfoot, partly due to more at Stumbleupon, but largely to the members of my Laughline mailing list at Yahoo, which I have had for the last 8 years. There are some great people on this list, who would probably enjoy Squidoo a lot, since they enjoy reading about people’s lives and writing back. The Squidoo forums would suite them just fine.

It just goes to prove that blogging really does help your traffic, but it’s not just writing about your lenses or other promotions, I find that people enjoy reading about the things that are going on around you, even if it’s nothing important, just the silly daily things. That I believe is what makes a blog popular.

Well last night was one of those silly not much happening evenings, and yet it was eventful for the two of us. I came home, dinner was all ready (I have her well trained - well no not really - my girlfriend had the meal ready so that we could go out straight after), so we ate and then went out for a walk. As it common in many parts of the USA, roads are not designed to facilitate walking from one place to another, either there are no sidewalks, or like the community we live in, the buildings are surrounded by a golf course and beyond that a solid wall with no gates through it.

We decided last night to walk down the road to the local strip mall to see what was there. It’s only a small strip mall (row of shops set back from the main road for those of you not familiar with the USA), and hard to see exactly what is there by driving along. The only path through the gold course is for the golf carts to take, so we had to walk the long way around the buildings and down the main driveway. Then we walked along the shops and several medical offices, a deli and a local bar, past a run down movie theater, then stopped at a Checkers (drive-thru fast food place) and got banana milk shakes. I don’t know what it is, but in England banana shakes are very popular, but you hardly see them over here. Anyhow, we then walked through another mall section, and you couldn’t help but notice that half the shops were either closed down or had obviously very little business. There was a Thai restaurant and also a Chinese, both set back, hard to see. There was one couple in the Thai one, and nobody in the Chinese. Rather sad really. So we walked back, sneakily cut across a fairway to the buildings, half expecting the sprinklers to start up, got home and then watched tv while working on lenses and catching up on email.

Well there you are, not a particularly exciting evening in the scheme of things, but it’s often fun walking through somewhere that you haven’t been before. You see so much more when you walk, whether it’s shops or a park. We both really enjoy it.

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 9
Top 10,000: 5
Lenses: 67

NEW LENSES
The Daily Joke September 2008

MY TOP 5 LENSES
My Pet Peeves
Bournemouth
The Daily Joke September 2008
The Daily Joke April 2008
The Daily Joke Lensography

Well I wouldn’t call this weekend a really exciting one, but it was a good one.

Friday evening after a frustrating day at work, we went out to a local Greek run American restaurant that does good breakfasts, just to see what their evening meals were like. Both of us had had a frustrating day, with my brain about to explode because of work and not having been able to get home for lunch either. We had a good meal, and then went out for a walk along the beach.

It was still fairly crowded down there, it being a nice evening, and we hadn’t gone far when a crowd were gathering on the shore to see something. It was a baby octopus that had been washed up, only about 6-8 inches across, and it looked like it was attached to a clam shaped shell that was about 6 inches across. At least it appeared to be attached to it somehow. Still need to look that up on the internet. The ONE time we go down and don’t take the camera with us!

We walked for a good mile along the waters edge, dodging the odd jellyfish that had also been washed up, and watching surfers try out their skills as there were some good waves coming in. It was fairly dark when we got back, and the city of Deerfield Beach was giving a free concert down where we park, a Blues band, who were ok. There was a good sized crowd, and we just got out chairs out of the car and listened to the music while people watching, one of our favorite pastimes. There were a few small children dancing along to the music, and a few old folks too, plus couples walking along to the rhythm - all good fun.

Saturday I took my youngest daughter roller skating as a treat for her 4th birthday which was last week. She wanted her sister to go along, which was nice, so I had an 8 year old and 4 year old in tow. We went out to breakfast first, then to the roller rink, which fortunately wasn’t crowded at all - only a dozen people there. Well, by the time I got the skates on for the three of us my back was out! Trying to do all those laces while bending over pretty much did me in! Then of course my youngest couldn’t hardly stand on the carpet in her skates, let alone on the rink, and I haven’t skated since I was about 8, and I couldn’t then either, so it was tough trying to get her around the floor. Since she couldn’t stay upright, I had to hold her all the time, with my hand up high, which killed my back and had me straining a lot. It took about 30 minutes to complete a lap of the arena, by which time I was soaked in sweat and sore. She did improve a bit by the end though, and her older sister did pretty good too. Then I took them out for a snowball (shaved ice cone) and home to their Mom, before heading back home and down to the beach with my Princess.

The ocean was quite rough on Saturday, and whereas the water is quite shallow with a sandbar normally, this time the water was deeper. It was still fun in the ocean, but by the end of the day my back was really stiff. We went home, cooked a meal, then went and did some grocery shopping, home and to play catch up on lens maintenance.

Sunday we got up, made some breakfast, then wandered down to the beach late morning. I have neved seen the surge like it there, with the waves crashing in and water piling up the beach. Of course we like most people expected the tide to start going out, but instead the waves surged stronger at times, catching people unawares and they had to scramble as water poured all over where they were sitting.

The lifeguards were kept constantly busy with so many people letting their children play near the rocks, and even adults were being swept off their feet as the waves surged in. It was a wonder that nobody got hurt! Luckily we picked a patch of beach behind some low rocks, and although we caught a few sprays of water from time to time, the sand was higher on our part and we never once had water come where we were sitting. Once it was a near miss, but I ended up making a small wall of sand to stop any others hitting us, and the ocean took the hint and didn’t even bother. I felt a bit like King Canute, with most of the people on the beach sitting much further back than we were. We just picked the right spot! I had a great time in the water being washed around by the waves, while my Princess worked on her tan.

After the beach, we headed home, cleaned up, then I fixed us some chicken and salad which was yummy. We wandered out for the evening to Delray Beach, about 15 miles to the north of us, which looked like it had a street with some fancy shops and restaurants. I had only driven down it once before, and unfortunately last night there wasn’t too much going on, but we did look in some shop windows at some curios, and pass some good cooking smells, and best of all there was a Kilwins there. This is an ice-creamery and fudgery chain from Michigan, which now has quite a few stores in Florida as well. So we naturally of course stopped for an ice cream, had a nice walk, then home to the lenses…

My Princess did a bit more work on our joint New York lens, which is now published, but still needs some finishing touches to it. I finally got around to creating my Daily Jokes for September lens (which gives you an idea of how far behind I am). It’s almost complete, and I will give you a run down of that, plus the New York lens very soon. The Lensrank took so long to update yesterday that I’m only now publishing this, and the Daily Jokes lens is complete.

It’s funny watching us working on our lenses, 2 pillows propped up behind us, both lying on the bed, computers on our laps. It’s very productive though at times.

If you haven’t registered with Tagfoot yet, it’s a great place to make new friends and to promote your lenses. You can also earn money with Adsense on Tagfoot which is great.

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 7
Top 10,000: 6
Lenses: 67

NEW LENSES
The Daily Joke September 2008

MY TOP 5 LENSES
My Pet Peeves
Bournemouth
Religious Jokes
My Claim To Fame
The Daily Joke April 2008

If you haven’t registered with Tagfoot yet, this is taking off really well.  It’s a lot faster than Digg, which just seems to be getting impossibly slow these days, and a lot nicer, plus all your friends are signing up too.  People are posting some great articles on there this week.  You can also earn money with Adsense on Tagfoot which is great.

Work was very busy yesterday, so when I got home dinner was ready, and we headed off down the beach for a walk as the sun went down, then watched the full moon rise from the water.  It’s very relaxing walking along the water’s edge in the moonlight, very romantic too, except the recent storms had washed up lots of seaweed and this was washing back and forth, so you had to constantly watch where you were walking.  Lots of coral had been washed up too.

My girlfriend is now ploughing ahead with her lenses having got a new laptop over the weekend.  That means we aren’t fighting for mine in the evening or at the weekend, which is nice.  So we should now be able to both work on lenses at the same time, as well as not having to wait for each other.  I’m hoping I can now start to catch up a bit.

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 7
Top 10,000: 7
Lenses: 66

MY TOP 5 LENSES

My girlfriend and I are both still working on our joint New York lens, which is coming along nicely, but I think it’s going to be a monster. We have so much material to add yet, lots of photos, descriptions, advice on what to do and what to see, plus our own observations. I hope it will be a hit when it’s published.

My Pet Peeves
Poddys Lensography
My Claim To Fame
Religious Jokes
Bournemouth

If you haven’t taken a look at Tagfoot yet, drop by and see what’s happening.

Tagfoot is a bit like Digg, except it’s a lot faster and has a sweet interface too.

Lots of your fellow Squids are there already - I have a feeling that Tagfoot will be a great success once it comes out of Beta.

September 11th is an odd day for me these days. It’s often a quiet one, reflecting back on the events of 7 years ago, for not only was this a very emotional day for the whole world, it was my son’s 21st birthday. So now every year the opportunity for him to celebrate his special day gets dampened by the remembrance of that awful day.

I was lucky this morning and managed to find him at home in England when I called on the way to work here in Florida. We had a long chat which was nice. He is usually impossible to get hold of, since he works shifts and when he is not working he is usually either out or sleeping.

My girlfriend started on our new venture yesterday, a joint lens on New York, and I am looking forward to adding my sections to this. We had such a wonderful time there, I can’t wait to see our commentary together in the same lens. Since she has the same crazy sense of humour that I do, I hope it will be a really popular lens. For a change it should be a popular subject compared with some of the lenses that we have both created.

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 7
Top 10,000: 7
Lenses: 66

MY TOP 5 LENSES

My Pet Peeves had some more modules added to it yesterday, plus a Squdcast, and although this was late yesterday evening I guess it did the trick, moving the lens from 6th place to #1 as far as my lenses. Bournemouth also rose slightly due to imoroved traffic and more backlinks. I’m waiting for other changes to kick in still and have more lenses to update and promote on Stumbleupon.

My Pet Peeves
Poddys Lensography
Bournemouth
My Claim To Fame
The Daily Joke - April 2008

I haven’t posted anything for a few days because I was away in New York City with my girlfriend.

We had the time of our lives there, practically perfect weather with blue skies and temperatures around 80F, apart from Saturday from late afternoon for about 4 hours when the remnants of Tropical Storm Hanna blew through, with torrential rain and causing flooding.  But that soon stopped, and by Sunday morning the skies were clear blue again.

I think that we will turn the trip into a joint effort lens, with plenty of advice on visiting New York, as well as photos, and our unique viewpoints on various places and attractions.  I’m not sure if anyone has done a joint lens before, so it might be another first.

We stayed in Manhattan just 1 block from Times Square.  You could see part of the ABC “Good Morning America” banner from the room.  We did bus tours of Downtown and Uptown, did a boat trip around the Statue Of Liberty, went up the Empire State Building, walked around Central Park several times, even had a Rickshaw ride through the park and back to the hotel.  

Walked around so many streets, saw so many amazing sights, including Ground Zero, which was very emotional.  It’s the first place where I have seen a museum and church put out boxes of tissues for the visitors.  Neither of us could talk inside the WTC Tribute Museum for fear of choking up.

We did a night bus tour of the city on Friday, winding back at the Theater District as the shows were ending.  There was a crowd waiting outside where Grease had just ended, Taylor Hicks (American Idol winner) was starring, and we got photos, plus I got to shake his hand.

We had to ride the open top tour bus back for an hour on Saturday in the torrential rain, either that or wait an hour for another one with space downstairs or take a taxi, but you know sometimes you have to take the crazy option.   Well the heavens opened, but luckily it wasn’t too windy.  As the ride went on we got wetter and wetter, the drips and puddles on our freebie ponchos found more places to leak into, and every time the bus stopped and started a 3 inch deep river sloshed backwards and forwards over our feet.   We just sat miserably along with 4 other people at the front of the bus, and then there were 4 more and the tour guide further back.  Every time the guide said “look left at this” or “look right to see that” we just burst out laughing, since if we attempted to lift our heads up the water would soak us, or blow off our hoods, and then to try and pull them back up the poncho would fly up over our heads and need to be pulled down again.   We were just laughing hysterically the whole time.

Well we have plenty more material which we are going to save for the lens, as well as over 600 photos and 3 hours of video to go through…  So keep your eyes open for when we get the lens under way…

Meanwhile back to Squidoo……..

I got paid yesterday - woohoo :)   The largest payout yet, the best amount per tier ever I think.  So that was nice.  Google has picked up on several of my lenses, in particular My Pet Peeves.  Today the lens rank updates saw all but 3 of my top 40 lenses drop in ranking for some reason, so I need to get busy and work on some updates.  It was hard to do in New York with a horribly slow wired connection in the hotel room, but now I’m back and determined that September is going to be a good month.

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 8
Top 10,000: 6
Lenses: 66

MY TOP 5 LENSES

My top 5 lenses are mostly unchanged since 4th September, however despite Google having picked up on My Pet Peeves and giving it the best traffic ever, it’s ranking has dropped to 6th place. I expect it to pick up in a few days however, but as long as the lenses stay in the Top 2,000 I’m happy.

Poddys Lensography
My Claim To Fame
The Daily Joke - April 2008
Bournemouth
The Daily Joke Lensography

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.