The Poddyland News

The weekend here in South Florida was quite a washout, especially on the East Coast, but as planned yesterday we set off for the West Coast and the Islands of Sanibel and Captiva, taking a risk that there was a 60% chance it would be cloudy and a 40% chance of rain.

We got up early, and were out of the door just after 7am, grabbing bagels and coffee before heading southwest to Alligator Alley and the 100 mile drive across Florida. Alligator Alley is one of the few roads that cross the Everglades in South Florida, and in the canals at the side of the road you can frequently see alligators sunning themselves. Not sure whether it was because it was cloudy and also early in the day, but Debbie only saw 2. The only other time I had been the full length of Alligator Alley I saw over 100! Reaching Naples on the West Coast we headed north to Fort Myers, and then across a pretty causeway to Sanibel Island.

I have to give Debbie 5***** for her navigating. We only had a printout from Google plus a tourist leaflet that we picked up from a tourist information place when we hit Naples, and she did amazingly well. We did get lost on Sanibel, but as it’s only a small island (5 miles long) you can’t get too lost. Still, we saw some very nice houses with very interesting mailboxes, which gave us some ideas for another lens maybe, so we stopped and took photographs as we tried to find the main road again. There are lots of great holiday homes there, it’s very quiet, and although most of the beaches are private or for residents, there are 3 public beaches.

Debbie thought that Bowmans Beach, about halfway along Sanibel would be a good place, and it was a perfect choice. The parking was good, plenty of space, good facilities, and a wonderful beach. Sanibel and Captiva are world famous for their shells, the beaches being covered in them. Unlike most beaches, these have dunes and mangroves at the back of them rather than buildings, so it seems really remote, and there are just thousands of shells. I found several hermit crabs in nice shells (put them back though), and also a puffer fish that was about the size of my finger nail. I managed to pick that up and Debbie filmed it swimming in my cupped hands. We got great pictures of Blue Herons and Ibis’s fishing, and one Blue Heron let me get within 20 feet of it too. Didn’t manage to get any spectacular shells, but we did find lots of pretty smaller ones to bring home.

The weather turned out to be practically perfect, and we had a wonderful time. However we hadn’t got more than 20 miles on the way home before it started raining - hard - and it rained most of the way home too. Whereas we had a wonderful day, back on the East Coast it had rained most of the day and was gloomy, so we were again incredibly lucky, just like when we were in New York a month ago.

Got home around 8:30pm, having driven just under 400 miles. The rain had stopped, The Amazing Race was running 35 minutes late so I didn’t miss any of that, and the whole day was just another perfect example of how wonderful life is with the two of us together.

And then we looked at the lens stats for yesterday…

I think I should call yesterday Black Sunday as far as the Lens Rankings go. I now have only 3 lenses left in Tier One, and 9 in Tier 2, despite higher traffic. I have had over 2,200 visits in the last 7 days, the highest ever by far, and yet the worst ranking status in almost 6 months.

Despite having updated lenses and got more traffic, several of my lenses as well as Debnet’s have just dropped thousands of places yet again. It’s not got to the point where I want to give up, but it’s almost to the point where both of us feel that we are putting in an awful lot of effort for precious little return.

I haven’t managed to check Squidu yet to see if anyone else commented on the rankings, but I know that several of our lenses got more traffic in the last few days, yet still dropped heavily. It doesn’t give you a lot of confidence when that happens.

The only thing that is going in the right direction financially is Adsense. A record for September with $74, and based on the daily average, including today, we should be set to earn close to $100 this month. I hope so, since nothing else is working.

Thanks very much to Mulberry for giving some good advice on how to potentially make more money with my lenses. This is very much appreciated, and I aim to do something to try and turn our earnings around by re-focusing lenses. Hopefully by next month we can see some positive changes.

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 3
Top 10,000: 9
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
Religious Jokes
Bournemouth
The Daily Joke 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

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

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

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

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

Tropical Storm Fay is now on it’s way north from us thankfully.  We managed to take the afternoon off work yesterday, and didn’t have to be in until 10am this morning, but it really didn’t turn out to be much more than some blustery wind and heavy squalls of rain.  I’m quite thankful for that, but it would have been nice to spend the day at home today too.  My girlfriend is really trapped inside - it’s not nice enough to go out, so she didn’t leave the condo yesterday and probably won’t today either.  Might have to take a walk or something tonight if the weather clears up enough.

Well my lenses didn’t get much attention yesterday either.  I caught up on some of my email backlog, but I didn’t work on the lenses, and the rankings reflect that.  Other than a couple of them, the rankings dropped again.  I am now 3 lenses below my target for the Top Tier, so I will have to work on promoting them as we are getting close to monthend.

I was made aware also that some of the You Tube videos are not working, so I will have to go in and edit the lenses to fix that problem.  All time consuming… The more lenses you get, the more you are faced with the decision of whether to work on new lenses or on promoting existing ones.  Almost need to turn it into a business, and delegate some of the work…

Well that’s my updates for the day - all safe and sound after the storm, and with lenses in need of some TLC…

LENS STATUS
Top     100        0
Top  2,000        7
Top 10,000       8

Today my lenses plummeted again, but I didn’t manage to do any updates over the weekend, and have an almighty backlog of things to do, however I plan to get back on track sometime this week if I can. 

The good news is that they allowed my girlfriend into the country, and she is going to be here for 9 1/2 weeks.  The bed news is that it took 15 hours from the time the plan landed until she came out of the airport, but I will let you hear the full story from her directly, when she gets around to writing about it.   She thought of creating a lens about it, but we don’t know right now…   But at least she is here, we are both exhausted, physically and emotionally, but recovering and of course together

From last week I still have 20-30 lenses that I plan to visit and comment on, but didn’t do anything over the weekend, so if I said I would visit your lens, it’s still on the list…  I just need time to catch up.  Most importantly I need time to boost my lenses, since they have been dropping so bad.   But I have a few ideas…

However my plans might get thwarted, since Tropical Storm Fay is headed our way.  We are already seeing the outer bande come over, and it’s been raining since 9am this morning, thundering and we could lose power tonight and tomorrow.  Still, having just got my girlfriend here after 2 1/2 months apart, it would be nice to get a day off work tomorrow if they allow us to stay home - even if the weather is bad…

LENS STATUS
Top     100       0
Top  2,000       7
Top 10,000      8