The Poddyland News

It seems so long ago now (although it was only 10 days) that I found out that my Bournemouth lens had earned the coveted Purple Star award on Squidoo.

I was so excited, since this award is not given out lightly, and although my lens had already won the Lens Of The Day award last year, this just gave me renewed confidence in my ability to create quality lenses.

I was all set to publish a new blog  post about this, when I got busy with other tasks for a few days, and then my laptop decided to crash on me.   The Hard Drive got horribly corrupted, and having realised that it wasn’t going to be possible to get the system restored, I decided to buy a new 500gb Hard Drive to replace the 120gb one that came with the laptop.  The existing drive was already 90% full, despite my offloading my Music and Movies, so getting a larger drive was the best solution.  Since it only cost $90, it was well worth it.

The problem is that any system restore like this takes time, and in my case 4 days!  It’s nt just restoring Windows, it’s downloading and installing all the programs, remembering your logins and settings etc.  Lots to do.

I was very fortunate in that I took a backup 4 days before, and since I keep 7 days of mail on the server, I only lost updates to a couple of documents, and any emails that I had sent out in the last few days, but nothing else.   PHEW!  I am so relieved to have the system back…

And now it’s time to play catch up, and work on creating another lens that might get an award…

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

Today is hopefully going to be a good one, but what is mostly on my mind is whether they allow my girlfriend into the country or not tonight.  She is already airborne, so I just have to wait…  It also would have been my Dad’s birthday today (he passed away almost 2 years ago), so I am hoping that the stars are on our side.

I was in a discussion about good and bad traffic yesterday, and checked my stats this morning to find that someone on Stumbleupon had reviewed my Daily Jokes For April lens, and suddenly it has had more than 50 visitors yesterday alone.  Quite a few people on Stumbleupon have given it a Thumbs Up, so somehow it got onto the list of newly rated sites and off it took.  Should be good for a couple of days at least, and it made a difference in the rankings today – it went up 443 places and is now in the Top 2,000 again.

The Daily Joke for August is still doing well, although traffic has slowed sooner than I expected and I will have to do some more promotion. 

I decided to backup my laptop last night, started later than I had hoped, and then it took a lot longer than expected, so I didn’t get anything much done until 11pm, by which time it was too late to do any lens updates.  I just caught up with some mail, and visited 4 lenses that I had bookmarked yesterday.  Left a dozen or more lenses I had marked yesterday still on the list, probably now close to 30 on there.  I will get to them eventually though.

With my The Daily Jokes for August rising up yesterday, and also my Daily Jokes For February, I now have 2 more lenses in the Top 2,000.  One of the top ones dropped 400 places though, so I have to work on that to give it a boost. 

LENS STATUS
Top     100       0
Top  2,000      11
Top 10,000      5

I should note maybe that I have a total of 16 lenses in the Top 10,000, not 11 + 16, although I wish I did!  I changed the way I report them to only show the ones in that ranking, not accumulative.