The Poddyland News

I would like to introduce to you a new blogging community for Squidoo, Squidblogs.

Squidblogs is a Wordpress based blogs which is open for all lensmasters to join.   Registering with your Squidoo member id (so that you can be easily recognized), you can add links to your blogs, create profile pages, and blog to your heart’s content about your lenses and anyone elses if you want.

Come on in and take a look, and I hope you will join this community and help drive traffic to your lenses.

Wow!  I just spotted that my fan club on Squidoo is now 501.

It’s amazing that so many people have added themselves and decided to become fans.

Makes me feel good

I am hoping things continue to go well as I strive to reach the Giant Squid 100 Club.

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…

This is an idea from Lake Eerie Artists who suggested that there should be an opportunity to promote your lens(es) that flopped and failed to generate traffic.   You can read her post on Promote A Flop Day here.

I think this is a wonderful idea, giving a lonely lens with precious little traffic a new chance to flourish.

So please friends, add a comment to this post with details of your Lonely Lens and why you think it should be given a better chance to grow.  I hope this helps to generate extra traffic.

As well as promoting your own lens, please can you help your fellow lensmasters by taking a look at their lonely lenses too.   I am not advocating that you give them all FIVE STARS or anything – just do what you would when you visit any other lens.  This is purely to help give some extra exposure to great little lenses that need a boost.

Thanks everyone for participating.  You can help also by promoting this post, so that more people get to know about it, and if you came across this post first, don;’t forget to visit Promote A Flop Day and to do the same there.

May we see lots of lonely lenses start to bloom as a result.

South Florida has warmed up nicely, thankfully, and it’s back to being a very pleasant time of year again.  It’s nice and cool at night, not cold, and during the day the temperatures are rising to the mid 70’s with plenty of sunshine and a light breeze.  No need to put the air conditioning on, open the windows to let the fresh air in, it’s practically perfect.

The weekend was fairly uneventful, with my seeing my daughters on Sunday morning for breakfast and to take them to the park, but most of the rest of the weekend I sat in and tried to work on updating lenses on Squidoo and catching up with correspondence.  

I didn’t create any new lenses this week, however I finally got around to completing my final Song Lyrics lens, YMCA by The Village People.   I created this in July 2008 but never had time to complete it, and although it had a number of blank modules, the song has done well with the search engines and I get enough traffic so that without any promotion it’s actually the best performing of my Song Lyrics lenses.  Well now I have finished it, and think I did a pretty good job, but what is the probability that Google now drops it’s position so the traffic disappears?    As well as completing the lens, I added it to more groups, lensrolled it, Stumbled it, Tagfooted it too, so you would think things would improve…   Got any lenses related to the 70’s or Party Songs?  I would be happy to add them as Featured Lenses here.   One thing I was disappointed in, is that I had wanted to add a Featured Lens Module to highlight other lenses about Greenwich Village in New York or artists that had come from there.  Could I really find anything?  Nope!  A few lenses that mentioned it, and a few really awful lenses that I didn’t feel happy with linking to.  Maybe something good will come along in the future.

Debbie and I have also been busy working on our blog (see below), and the traffic is increasing nicely, with lots of our friends from Squidoo and Tagfoot visiting.  We haven’t added many postings to the blog in the last week, but I have lots of ideas for posts and pages – just need the time to focus on them.   

One thing I have been thinking about is Google Adsense.  Sometimes a click is worth only 1 cent or fewer than 10 cents, but at other times it can be worth a dollar or even more.   I need to do some research on the keywords that pay best on Adsense, and to try to steer some postings towards those topics, hoping to target visitors who will click on the more profitable ads.   This way we might be able to go from one to five dollars a day to fifty to one hundred dollars a day.   Here’s hoping I can find the secret sometime soon and put some new ideas to work.

HAVE YOU SEEN OUR NEW BLOG

Debbie (better know to some of you as Debnet) have a new blog, and we both invite you to join in the conversations there and to see what we are up to.   We plan to cover just about anything, from what each of us is doing while we are stuck 4,500 miles apart, to news, updates and information on trendy new items or web sites / software that we like.  So please if you have time drop in to see us at Off The Record.  Be sure to leave us a comment to let us know you were there. 

My SQUIDOO LENSES

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS

Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 4
Top 10,000: 9
Lenses: 74

NEW LENSES

The Best Breakfast Food
The Daily Joke January 2009

MY TOP 5 LENSES

1. The Best Breakfast Food
2. My Pet Peeves
3. Bournemouth
4. Zecharia Sitchin
5. The Daily Joke – February 2008

LENSES IN NEED OF LOVE – I AM LONELY – PLEASE VISIT ME

• Song Lyrics – The Jam Town Called Malice
• Song Lyrics – Squeeze – Up The Junction
• Song Lyrics – Madness – My Girl

It’s freezing cold here in South Florida today.  Well freezing is a relative term I know.  Put it this way, the temperature when I came to work this morning was 39 degrees.  If it was in the 40’s I could have just come to work in a short sleeved shirt as usual, but since it dipped into the 30’s, I decided to put a sweater on, mostly because of the cold wind.  

It was so funny sitting in traffic, watching people smoking like crazy as they often do on the way to work, cars all fogged up because they didn’t want to have to open their windows, and then some people wearing thick winter coats with hoods pulled up over their heads, trying to drive with just eyes and nose peeking out.  I mean it was barely below 40 degrees, not Minnesota or Canada.

It’s been an odd week really so far.   Last week was tough, with it being the second full week since I returned from England, but having Monday off for Martin Luther King day, and then spending time yesterday watching the inaugaration of President Obama, it just seemed different.   Maybe in some ways it’s a relief because I was dreading something happening during the ceremony, but all went ok and the man gave a fine speech.  I really hope he will prove to be a great president, one who not only cares about the USA as a nation, but about the people, and also the world that we live in.  From his stirring speech he certainly has dreams of making big changes, and I truly hope that he can succeed.

While on the subject of the President, I saw this morning that the WHITEHOUSE.GOV web site has been redesigned.  Gone is the stuffy old fashioned web site, and in has come a sweet looking new blog, with the first of many great articles to come.  Yes there certainly is a fresh feeling in The White House already.

As for the weekend, I took my daughters out to the park twice, and to the beach (just to the boardwalk of course as it was cold), and we had a great time together. 

I also managed to create two new lenses on Squidoo.   The first I created on Friday night, having had a thought while reading about the new Twitterstorm lens format.  So I put together a lens about The Best Breakfast Food and so far it’s done really well, soaring into the Top 1,000 in a matter of days.  makes a change for me.

Secondly I thought it was about time to start putting together The Daily Joke for January 2009.  This is the twelfth monthly Daily Joke lens that I have created, and the first in a few months that has had jokes and not funny pictures.   It’s hard to find really good jokes that I haven’t used before, but having had a break I am finding some, and with the gap since the last one I created I hope to be able to use some of my newly learned lensmaster skills to make it look better.

Both Debbie and I have also been busy working on our blog (see below), and the traffic is increasing nicely, with lots of our friends from Squidoo and Tagfoot visiting.

HAVE YOU SEEN OUR NEW BLOG

Debbie (better know to some of you as Debnet) have a new blog, and we both invite you to join in the conversations there and to see what we are up to.   We plan to cover just about anything, from what each of us is doing while we are stuck 4,500 miles apart, to news, updates and information on trendy new items or web sites / software that we like.  So please if you have time drop in to see us at Off The Record.  Be sure to leave us a comment to let us know you were there. 

My SQUIDOO LENSES

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS

Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 4
Top 10,000: 7
Lenses: 74

NEW LENSES

The Best Breakfast Food
The Daily Joke January 2009

MY TOP 5 LENSES

1. The Best Breakfast Food
2. My Pet Peeves
3. Bournemouth
4. Zecharia Sitchin
5. The Daily Joke – February 2008

LENSES IN NEED OF LOVE – I AM LONELY – PLEASE VISIT ME

• Song Lyrics – Dire Straits – Money For Nothing
• Song Lyrics – Donna Summer – Bad Girls
• Song Lyrics – The Police – Walking On The Moon

MY SQUIDOO ANNIVERSARY

Today (15th January) is the first
anniversary of my joining Squidoo. 

It seems amazing that it’s been a whole year since I created my first lens, Religious Jokes, and many more lenses have followed since then, my first still performing well, but right now none of my lenses are in the Top 2,000, although traffic is still good.  

July 2008 saw my recognition as a Giant Squid, and my catalog of 50 lenses at the time was complemented by a number of Song Lyric lenses, which is deemed to be a cookie-cutter format lens and not enough original content, but I like to think that the format I created for my Song Lyric lenses is a little different to those that some lensmasters put together.  They might not always perform too well, since there is a lot of competition for this topic, but I think they look good nevertheless.

One year on from joining Squidoo, what are my plans?

Well, I would like to join the Giant Squid 100 Club by having 100 quality lenses, but having only 70 so far and 25 of them Song Lyric lenses, this is not a priority of mine.  I don’t have the time to devote all my energy to creating lenses right now, so the best I can manage is 1 or 2 lenses a month.

My main plans with Squidoo this year are to firstly keep up with my goal of creating a Daily Jokes lens for each month, the first of these being February 2008, so another anniversary is coming up once I get the January 2009 lens completed.  My second goal is to try to create some lenses that earn money, rather than just getting traffic to my lenses.  My third and final goal is to complete the lenses on my home area in England.  The only one that is complete so far is Bournemouth, and although this won the much coveted Lens Of The Day award and is still one of my top lenses, the effort and research it took to create such a lens is hard to repeat.   I do have a number of other shell lenses for my home area, and really look forward to seeing these all complete and with plenty of visitors.  It is after all a beautiful and unique part of England and indeed the world.  Actually I do have a fourth goal, and that is to complete the biography part of my lensography.  I have covered the period from my birth up to 1988, but from there it will need to get really detailed, and I may have to split it into two lenses – or more…  I really would like to do this though, and also add many photographs from along the way.  I still think it makes a fascinating read if you would like to learn more about me.

THE NEW BLOG IS COMING ALONG

The new blog that Debnet and I are working on together is coming along really well right now.

We are managing to create posts on a number of various areas, and although the blog is only 2 weeks old, we are getting about 100 visitors a day, which is a good start I think.   I am hoping to get more like 1,000 visitors a day soon, but obviously it takes time for the readership to grow, and for the content to mature.   I do have plans for new pages on the blog, to cover seasonal product promotions, and also a list of other blogs, including Squidoo related blogs and blogs by Squidoo lensmasters.

Anyhow, if you haven’t seen our blog yet, or if you haven’t paid a visit lately, please find time to drop by, and if you like it, please feel free to leaveus a comment.   You can also subscribe to our posts. 

My SQUIDOO LENSES

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS

Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 0
Top 10,000: 9
Lenses: 73

NEW LENSES

The Daily Joke December 2008

MY TOP 5 LENSES

Zecharia Sitchin
Bournemouth
My Pet Peeves
The Lion Of Judah
The Daily Joke December 2008

LENSES IN NEED OF LOVE – I AM LONELY – PLEASE VISIT ME

Song Lyrics – Madness – Baggy Trousers 
Song Lyrics – Madness – Our House
Super Heroes Gone Wrong

FROM ONE COLD TO ANOTHER

I managed to escape catching a cold before I went to England for Christmas, dodged catching one while I was there, but lo and behold as soon as I get back to Florida, here we go – aah-choo!

You can read all about my pain and suffering on the latest post from Off The Record.  Please drop by and let me know you were here - comments always make me feel better

COME VISIT OUR NEW BLOG

I spent a lot of time over the Christmas break putting together a new blog for Debbie and I, and intend to use The Poddyland News here mostly for updates on our Squidoo lenses, however we will be covering a whole boatload of other topics on the new blog, and I hope you will come visit us.

OFF THE RECORD WITH DEBBIE AND TONY

My Squidoo Lenses

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS

Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 2
Top 10,000: 5
Lenses: 73

NEW LENSES

The Daily Joke December 2008

MY TOP 5 LENSES

The Daily Joke December 2008
Bournemouth
My Pet Peeves
My Claim To Fame
Religious Jokes

LENSES IN NEED OF LOVE – I AM LONELY – PLEASE VISIT ME

Song Lyrics – Dire Straits – Sultans Of Swing
Song Lyrics – Rod Stewart – Maggie May
Song Lyrics – Peter Gabriel – Sledgehammer

This post is me signing off for the holiday season as I attempt to gather all my things together ready for my flight to London on Friday night. I will be away until the beginning of January and will attempt to post while away, but my focus will be on enjoying the all too brief two weeks with my girlfriend, especially since we don’t know when we will be seeing each other again. February we hope, provided she gets her visa approved, but if not…. we are still waiting six weeks after she went to the US Embassy in London for a response.

It’s going to be cold, damp, and gloomy skies no doubt much of the time in the UK, as compared with Sunny Florida, but hopefully there will be some nice days when we can go out for walks. The countryside is so nice there, the woods and especially the New Forest, even the beaches. I am really looking forward to it, and this will be the first Christmas I have spent in England since 1993 too.

I have spent the last week fighting off a horrible cold. The last thing I want is to fly for 9 hours with a streaming nose and a sore throat and spinny head. So for days now I have dosed up on Airborne, extra glasses of Orange Juice, Tylenol, and even Night Nurse the last 3 nights. I also took a steam two nights running, and that has helped clear my head and so far (touch wood) I might have this cold licked before it had a chance to catch hold of me. Keep your fingers crossed

I am going to sign off by wishing you all a VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS and a HAPPY AND PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR. I hope Santa brings you lots of nice things – however old you are, and that you have time to spend with family and friends.

Until 2009, this is me signing off…..

PS: Please feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to visit my lenses if you have a chance.

Oops – nearly forgot – I updated my Song Lyrics – Walking On The Moon by The Police lens to change the way that the lyrics are displayed. I would be interested in your comments. I got the idea from one of the lenses by Jaguar Julie and I hope you like it. I think there is still room for improvement, and then I will probably clone out the new format to all my other Song Lyric lenses.

If you are in need of some Christmas laughter, I sincerely recommend my Christmas Jokes pages which have been getting lots of traffic since I updated them to add new pictures and also put Adsense on them. Also my Funny Christmas Pictures lens, which I updated to add several videos of amusing Christmas songs that I thought were cute.

If you have any family or friends that you plan to call over the holidays, or if you are travelling abroad, this is the company that I use for my calling cards – Almost Free Phone Calls. There are no hidden charges, the calls to the UK and anywhere in Europe, South America, Asia or Australia are really cheap, and I have saved myself hundreds of dollars in the last year by using their cards, as against paying the high rates charged by my long distance company or cell phone company. It’s not even half the price – it’s far lower than that! Serious Savings… So take my advice, plan ahead and save yourself some money on those phone calls. The cards don’t expire either, and you can use them with your mobile too.

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 3
Top 10,000: 10
Lenses: 73

NEW LENSES
The Daily Joke December 2008

MY TOP 5 LENSES
The Daily Joke December 2008
Bournemouth
My Pet Peeves
Golf Jokes
The Daily Joke October 2008

LENSES IN NEED OF LOVE – I AM LONELY – PLEASE VISIT ME
Premiata Forneria Marconi
Song Lyrics – Madness – Baggy Trousers
Song Lyrics – Peter Gabriel – Spedgehammer

There is always so much going on this time of year isn’t there!

It seems here in the USA that everyone looks forward to Thanksgiving at the end of November, which is of course a 4 day holiday for most people, something that overworked American really needs, but it’s no time to relax… There is the great meal of course, time with the family and friends, football games, and then the following day the biggest baddest craziest shopping day of them all.

Well that is all behind us now, but once Thanksgiving is over, there is the mad rush to get the house decorated for Christmas, to buy presents and wrap them, and then all the Christmas Parties to attend. By the time Christmas Day arrives, I think most people are just plain exhausted.

Despite having lived in the USA for 14 years, most of it in Indiana and more recently in Florida, it seems odd to me that the stores all have huge sales before Christmas and not afterwards. In the UK, the sales start on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, at which point everyone has been forced to buy gifts at full price, and so the sales are to allow the stores to sell off what is left, to make room for the Springtime items. It doesn’t seem logical to me that everywhere would want to drop the price oif products before Christmas. Who in their right mind would want to buy anything at full price when they know everything is going to be on sale? You would think that it would be in the interest of stores to hold off on the sales as they do in the UK – but hey – I am not complaining one bit – I like to save money the same as everyone else, but it just doesn’t make good business sense to me.

And so with it being the season for Christmas parties etc, yesterday saw our IT Department Grab Bag event at work.

The idea of this is that everyone brings in a gift, worth around $20. Everyone draws numbers to see the order that gifts are going to be selected in, and then one at a time the people go up and select a gift from the table. You can either select a new gift, or “steal” one that has already been taken from someone else. you can’t steal back anything you already had, and each gift can only be stolen 3 times.

Well, moreso than usual, the majority of the gifts were of course booze! Lots of Baileys, various Vodkas, Rums, one Single Malt Scotch, cocktail kits etc…

Since I am off to the UK for Christmas and you can’t take liquid in your hand luggage any more, I decided to not go for alcohol, and instead try to get a gift voucher. Last year I ended up with one for a local restaurant, which was good and saved me money – far more useful than something that I don’t need, especially as money is tight.

And so up I went, picked a small package, and it turned out to be a voucher for Barnes & Noble (a large bookstore chain if you are not familiar with them). I thought “ok, I don’t read much, but I can at least make use of this”.

Well that got stolen eventually, and I went up again, since most other people had selected bottles of booze by now, and these were getting “stolen” like crazy. I ended up with a 4gb Flash Drive. “Ok I thought, I already have 5 of these, but another might come in handy, or I can always re-gift it. A 16gb Flash Drive would be nice, since I can get 4gb ones for under $10 these days”.

And so the drawings went on, until that too got stolen. No great loss I thought to myself. With nothing that I really wanted from the already opened gifts, except a Bluetooth Headset that my friend had picked, and I wasn’t going to take that from him as he wanted it, so I went up and opened a 3rd parcel.

“Wow” my boss said, “that’s great, it’s a Sushi Board!”. “Wow” I thought to myself. “What the heck do I want with a Sushi Board?” Ok I will eat sushi if it’s on a buffet somewhere, but I never buy it, and I have no idea how to prepare it and would never dream of doing that. Besides, my girlfriend doesn’t even eat fish, let alone raw fish… It’s a nice wooden board, so I checked the web site it came from (which was on a sticker) in case I could somehow return it to a local store. Nope – it’s a small wood-working company, and would you believe they only sell these in pairs! So I don’t even have a complete set, only half of one! Oh joy…

Well my friend eventually lost his Bluetooth headset and ended up with 3 silver photo frames. He was not too pleased, but hey it’s more use than a damn sushi board! You can at least re-gift that… Another colleague had several gifts that he wanted, but both got stolen and he ended up with a box of chocolates. He grumbled for ages, so I thought “I can at least take the chocolates to England and my girlfriend and I can share them”. So I offered to swap with him. Would you believe I couldn’t even entice him to do that. Bloody sushi board…

So here I am with a sushi board stuck in the bottom drawer of my desk at work. You couldn’t even use it as a cutting board as the bottom is tapered in and it would probably tip over. So much for my hopes of finding a voucher to a restaurant and saving myself some money. I think I am just going to stick it in the kitchen at work with a sign that says “any takers”. What’s the betting nobody wants it even if it’s free?

I just thought that this would be an ideal topic to add to The Worst Gifts I Ever Received which is a very funny lens about personal experiences of having received the most awful gifts. If you haven’t seen this lens yet, I think you will enjoy it.

My Christmas Jokes pages have been getting lots of traffic since I updated them to add new pictures and also put Adsense on them. Last week I had been getting up to 12,000 page views daily, but for a couple of days they seemed to lose traffic and didn’t appear on the first page of Google, but now we are back at the number 3 spot if you search for Funny Christmas Pictures and yesterday I had just under 8,000 page views. Please drop by and take a look, I hope to raise some good laughs around the world.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Debnet has created a great lens about Christmas Crackers which are a great British Tradition, one which hasn’t really caught on yet in the USA, but everyone I know over here who has seen Christmas Crackers thinks that they are great. The lens also shows where you can order them, and there is just enough time to shop before Christmas arrives…

Right now time for me is going by fast, and it’s only NINE DAYS until I fly to England for Christmas and New Year. I am really looking forward to this, especially as I haven’t spent Christmas back home in England since 1993.

I could use the break. I took almost half of my 10 days vacation in February to go to England, and I am using the last 5 now, so the rest of the year I took practically nothing off. I am ready for a nice break, and also to see my princess…

If you have any family or friends that you plan to call over the holidays, or if you are travelling abroad, this is the company that I use for my calling cards – Almost Free Phone Calls. There are no hidden charges, the calls to the UK and anywhere in Europe, South America, Asia or Australia are really cheap, and I have saved myself hundreds of dollars in the last year by using their cards, as against paying the high rates charged by my long distance company or cell phone company. It’s not even half the price – it’s far lower than that! Serious Savings… So take my advice, plan ahead and save yourself some money on those phone calls. The cards don’t expire either, and you can use them with your mobile too.

Oh yes – before I forget, A NEW LENS on Squidoo…

Having got November out of the way, I managed to work on my December lens over the weekend. This has a great collection of Funny Christmas Pictures, and so far it’s been climbing up in the Squidoo rankings nicely.

There is a module in there that allows you to add a link to any Christmas lenses that you may have and to vote on them, and you are very welcome to come and add your yours, as well as to grab the module to use on your own lens. I would just ask that if you do, please can you lensroll me back, and of course I will return the favor by lensrolling you.

Have A Wonderful Week One And All, and don’t overdo it on the Egg Nog!

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 4
Top 10,000: 9
Lenses: 73

NEW LENSES
The Daily Joke December 2008

MY TOP 5 LENSES
Bournemouth
The Daily Joke December 2008
My Pet Peeves
The Daily Joke October 2008
The Daily Joke November 2008

LENSES IN NEED OF LOVE – I AM LONELY – PLEASE VISIT ME
Song Lyrics – Robert Palmer – Addicted To Love
Song Lyrics – Peter Gabriel – Spedgehammer
Song Lyrics – Rod Stewart – Maggie May