The Poddyland News

I powered my laptop on at lunchtime to find the desktop showing a message indicating that I had spyware running. Of course it wanted me to buy a product, PC PROTECTION 2008 which is a fake product. Meantime, it keeps popping up warning messages to try and get me to click and buy the product.

So I made sure my AVG anti-virus was up to date, updated Search And Destroy (Spyware Protection) and I’m currently trying to eradicate 3 spyware products, 2 of which are nasty ones.

Other than downloading a new version of Wordpress yesterday, I don’t recall having done anything else out of the ordinary, and I do use Firefox as my browser too which further protects me.

I ran Search And Destroy - looks like I have a nasty case of Smitfraud-C - a persistent piece of software that is hard to get rid of and which steals things! Could be a rough night for Debbie as I get completely frustrated at failed attempts to clean my pc…

Wish me luck…

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.

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

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

Doesn’t matter if I access Digg at home or at work, the pages take forever to load.   I just wondered if it was the same for everyone else, or just for me?

Whenever a site takes a long time to load and I have a lot I need to do, I get very frustrated with it and tend not to use it.  I can’t say I have had much success with Digg, ditto with Del.icio.us either, but if Digg can’t speed itself up, I might just give up…

Have you had any success with either of these sites at all?  I don’t seem to get any of my del.icio.us submissions tagged by anyone else.  I have got a few mutual friends, but other than that, nothing…

If you are interested, I would be pleased to connect with you on Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon etc.   My id is Poddys on all of them.

This is an extract today from the local newspaper in my home town of Bournemouth which I thought was pretty funny.

IT’S not the usual fish and chips, but one aquatic business in East Dorset has gone to great lengths to stop its goods being turned into a takeaway.

Greenmann Aquatics at Three Legged Cross has decided to microchip its prized Koi carp after an overnight raid in July, which saw 10 examples worth £1,000 stolen.

Staff at the centre chip the fish onsite at a cost of around £15 each - small fry when they are worth £200-£500 a time.

You can read the whole article and some funny comments at The Bournemouth Echo - a great local newspaper covering the news for the Bournemouth area.

This would make a good article to add to the Fish & Chips lens that was Lens Of The Day last week.

It’s August 1st today, the start of another month, the anticipation of what the June payout will bring (I anticipate a good one for me) and then wondering how we all did in July, after Black Sunday…

Spent last night mostly on correspondence, visiting lenses I had earmarked from visits to the lounge during the day, catching up on other lenses from previous days, reviewing and commenting on some really good lenses, some from newcomers as well.  I also had quite a few comments during the day on both My Claim To Fame as well as my new lens Super Heroes Gone Wrong, so I made sure to visit those lensmasters and their lenses as I always do.  It all takes time as you know.

This weekend I have another new lens to work on, I hope it’s again going to be something that will catch on with a lot of people.   I have lots of other lenses that are incomplete that I would really like to get moving with as well.  They got put on hold for several months while I was working on quick lenses to get over 50 for the Giant Squid qualification.  The ones I have to complete take a few days each to complete, if not a week or more.  And then I am taking my daughters out to breakfast and to the park tomorrow as well, my weekend treat with them.

I hope you all did well and recovered ok from Black Sunday, hope you have a fabulous weekend too.

My Pet Peeves has been doing well, but firstly a news article yesterday about people giving their children ridiculous names, and then an almost daily peeve I have about roundabout challenged people, prompted me to add a couple of new modules to the lens.

I hope you will take a peek, and I hope you enjoy the additions to the lens.

Another of My Pet Peeves is when people are given an invitation and then don’t take advantage of it.  So you heard - off you toddle and go visit My Pet Peeves right now…

If not, I might be forced to call for the help of my trusty assistants Cal E. Mari and Tent A. Culz to persuade you…