The Poddyland News

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

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

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

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