Lens Harbor

Woohoo! This week the poll on my lens about the online game Fallen Sword got its one thousandth vote! That’s way more votes than any other lens poll I have.

It didn’t happen overnight, the lens will be 2 years old in a few weeks, but it’s cool to see a poll get that much interest. It’s also good to know people read down the lens at least as far as the poll module. Here’s a screen shot…

One thing that I think helped get this much participation (other than traffic) was offering more than 2 choices. When I see a poll where the only options are “It’s Great” and “It Sucks”, I’ll usually pass if my opinion isn’t at either extreme. But if there are some more moderate options to choose, I’ll probably vote.

Look at the results above…40% of the votes were for the middle three options. That’s 400 votes that might not have been cast if the only options were “Awesome” and “Complete Rubbish”.

Ain’t paid for TV in over 9 years
Been doin’ just fine with my rabbit ears

Now every month I gotta send them my money
But I’ll get to watch The Office…man, that show’s funny

Yeah, I know, a real Blues tune shouldn’t end on a bright note. But I like my TV fresh and free off the airwaves and needed to find a positive here…plus this is my first attempt at writing a Blues tune.

Our local NBC affiliate’s signal is so weak that we had to watch The Office online or wait for the DVD. Now we’ll get to watch it when it first airs! Well…except when it’s on against Survivor, but we can still tape it.

So that’s a good thing and hopefully makes it easier writing out our new cable bill each month.

This summer offers a cool opportunity to see tall ships in action during the Tall Ships® Atlantic Challenge 2009.  It’s a series of tall ship races on a 7,000 mile course around the North Atlantic Ocean that follows the routes used when tall ships ruled the seas.  The race began in Vigo, Spain, last month and the Dutch vessel Tecla won the first race to the Canary Islands.  Now the fleet is racing to Hamilton, Bermuda.

There are 5 more stops in port cities along the course with multi-day tall ship festivals held in each city.  In addition to watching the ships sail in and out, events at each port typically include ship tours, dock parties and lots of fun, food & music.   These make for a fun date or family outing and can be educational at the same time.

Check the list below for more info on each port’s festival…
Hamilton, Bermuda June 11-15, 2009
Charleston, SC, USA June 26-29, 2009
Boston, MA, USA July 8-13, 2009
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada July 16-20, 2009
Belfast, Ireland August 13-16, 2009

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend any of the festivals this year…bummer.

If you can’t attend either, but would like to check out a tall ship then here’s a list of tall ships you can tour.  If you’re land locked far away from port you can try watching a good tall ship movie to get your fix.  And, for the more adventurous, you could sign up to join a tall ship crew as a trainee.

Like others, my lenses get a variety of guestbook comments.  Unfortunately some of them aren’t lens worthy…spam, profanity or flaming other commenters mostly…so they don’t get approved.

Years ago, when Squidoo rolled out the Guestbook module, I chose to keep any comments that I didn’t approve in pending status as a record of what had been submitted.  Yeah, I can be a pack rat…hate to throw stuff away in case it has a use someday.   And I like to keep stats on things.

What use could keeping unapproved comments around have? Entertainment value mostly.  It’s funny sometimes to scroll through and see the lame spam attempts.  But the annoyance of having to scroll through them every time I want to approve a comment now outweighs any entertainment value.

I just counted and my dashboard shows a total of 73 unapproved comments dating back to June, 2007.  40 of them are from other lensmasters, the rest from anonymous visitors.  I’m tempted to keep the ones from other lensmasters because I have used those to decide whether to ban someone from commenting if they continually post spam…but that wouldn’t reduce the scrolling issue much.

So I’m clearing out the bilge and getting rid of these worthless relics.

Does anyone else keep unapproved comments around…or do you toss them immediately?

(Rereading this post reminded me of the AT&T wireless commercials about the unused rollover minutes.)

When you have multiple lenses covering a core subject (especially one with its own jargon), it gets repetitive writing the same explanations over and over again.

Consider building a glossary lens to supplement the content on those lenses.  Then whenever you use a jargony term, simply create a hyperlink and point your readers to the definition on your glossary lens.

Benefits of this are:
1. A common set of original definitions that you write once and link to from your other lenses and blogs.
2. Continue to demonstrate your subject expertise by pointing visitors to explanations that you wrote.
3. Declutter your core lenses so they stay focused on the meaty content. If someone needs a definition, they can click on the link.
4. Another lens to earn revenue, attract search engine traffic and refer traffic to your other lenses!

After my 2nd or 3rd fantasy football lens, I built a fantasy football glossary to support them. About 2/3 of the visits come from my lenses that link to it but there are search engine visits as well. Plus it even refers a little traffic back to my other lenses.

My preference is to use a text module for each term defined. Use the term as your module title and write up an explanation in the body. Then you can link to that specific module from your other lenses using the term as the anchor text. Remember to add a handy Table of Contents for visitors who found your glossary from a search engine and are starting at the top of the lens.

Final thought…only hyperlink a term once per lens.  That way your lens text won’t turn into an unsightly mass of hyperlinks if you use that term a lot.

When I added a module about Sarah Palin and updated the tags on my Why Vote for John McCain lens yesterday (the day of the announcement) there were two other lenses on the “Sarah Palin” tags page.  Today there are ten lenses on it and there will probably be 50 or more this time next week.

Congrats to SusanVillaLewis for being way ahead of the search curve.  She had her Sarah Palin lens up back in March according to the earliest comments. I’m sure her pending comments list is overflowing right now.

Three groups that I was a member of closed in the past week. Two of the groupmasters entered a reason why they disbanded the group in the notification email. Both were basically due to the level of effort to maintain the group and lack of participation. No idea why the third closed.

I wasn’t an active participant in any of the three but I am sad to see the “Dads of Squidoo” group close down. It was one of the first groups I joined on Squidoo and I always thought it was a good group theme.

Maybe I’ve been lucky or it’s because of their niche focus, but my two groups don’t take much time to maintain. I get the occasional off topic submission but those are dealt with easily. I doubt they’ll get to a point where I want to shut them down completely. At worst, I would just post a note that the group is closed to new lenses.

With many lame groups being created daily, it’s getting tougher to sift through and find ones worth joining. Fortunately, Spirituality did a lot of the work for us by building the Great Groups Guide. It’s a cool and handy guide to focused groups that actually feature their members’ lenses. What a concept! (Full disclosure: both of my groups are listed on the lens.)

Last night I posted about competing in The Great Urban Race.  This morning I checked my GUR lens and saw that the Google blog search module on it had already picked up my SquidTop post.  Found it in less than 12 hours…that’s cool.

My wife and I are preparing to run in the Washington DC leg of The Great Urban Race on Saturday. Yeah, I never heard of it either until last month. It’s basically a mini version of The Amazing Race (one of our favorite shows) where you compete against other teams to complete tasks across the city.

As a lensmaster, part of my preparation naturally involved building a lens. I’ll update it afterwards with tips and stories from our experience on the race.

After DC, the race hits Chicago, Portland, the Twin Cities, Austin and San Diego before the National Championships in Las Vegas. If you live near any of those cities and want something different and fun to do, then give it a go.

Woohoo!! It took nearly 2 and a half years, but I published my 50th lens today!

Now I’m officially eligible to become a Giant Squid in September. I haven’t been this excited since I turned 35 and became eligible to run for US President! (hopefully I’ll have more success becoming a Giant Squid)

So what was the 50th lens? It’s my review of an excellent book called American Shaolin. The author took a break from college to study kungfu for two years with the Shaolin monks in China and wrote about his experience.