AJ is Always Juggling

The Purple Star programme on Squidoo has provoked some interesting discussion on the SquidU Forum. I am sure that it was only a coincidence that the discussion started after I announced my latest Purple Star

More about the Purple Star debate later, but I was thrilled when I got an email to inform me that my newest lens: The Year of the Tiger, had been awarded a Purple Star only six days after it had been published! The actual tangible benefits of the award, as pointed out on SquidU, are negligible but it is the appreciation from your fellow Lensmasters that makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

To think that someone enjoyed my lens and appreciated the work that I put into it so much, that they took the time to send an email nominating it for an award is what does it for me.

This made me realise that while it is OK to question processes and procedures, we should not lose sight of the fact that as a Community we should always be pleased if something happens to make a member of our Community happy!

The Purple Star debate got me thinking so much yesterday, that I decided to make a Lensography of my Purple Star lenses. I am proud of my Purple Stars and I see nothing wrong is saying so. However, it does seem that some people feel inhibited about publicly declaring they have received one. They are worried that it may seem like over-promotion.

Obviously, it is a very personal choice that people make, similar to the choice about whether to leave a message in a Guestbook if you have Blessed a lens as a Squidoo Angel. But the diversity of views is what makes the Squidoo Community so interesting and what I particularly like is the people with whom you can disagree in one thread, who then pop over to agree with you in another. It’s what makes the SquidU Forum such a nice (and adult) forum to be part of.

Not everyone visits the SquidU Forum, so I added a debate module to my Purple Star lens, which has already seen some activity. On the whole people seem to be happy with the way the Programme is managed, but it will be interesting to see how the discussion evolves.

My other Purple Star lenses:

• Bullying at Primary School
• 10 Best Plants for Bees
• Auditory Processing Disorder
• Trooping the Colour
• Christmas at AJs
• Environmentally Friendly Halloween Lights
  

Full of Squidoo tips, The Squidoo Step by Step Guidebook is the result of a collaboration between 10 pretty well known Lensmasters, who have pooled their knowledge to produce what they hope is a very simple guide, that will help you get traffic to your lenses.

This new Squidoo Guidebook is intended to simplify the process of creating and promoting a Squidoo Lens. A lot of thought and effort has gone in to the guidebook and we hope we have come up with a process that is as simple to understand as possible. Not only are there Checklists and screenshots, there’s also links to sites where you can promote your lenses.

However, not only do we have a completely FREE, no strings attached download, we also have a very special invitation for you, that is only available via the Guidebook. You can find out all about it on the lens: Squidoo Step by Step.

So go and grab yourself an early Christmas Gift.

Happy Christmas, with love from “Tenfinity”!

I was very proud of the links on my Lose Weight on a Wheat Free Diet lens. It took a lot of work on my part to keep the Plexo spam free because for every link that made it on there, I probably deleted 50 spam lenses and websites!

All I asked was that people leave links to wheat free recipes and I would get links submitted to “strip that fat, while getting six pack abs as you have dental implants in Houston” sites, but I did not mind. It kept the lens updated and fresh as I religiously deleted them all.

But a few weeks back all the links disappeared and I keep forgetting to do anything about it. I will be contacting Stazjia and Treasures by Brenda to ask them to resubmit their lenses, but if you have any wheat free recipes please pay a visit to Losing Weight on a Wheat Free Diet to help re-build that plexo.

…and also published a lens about Robbie Williams wedding!

But first Squidlog. Chef Keem is really tied up helping launch a new restaurant, so I offered to update his Squidlog lens for him as I noticed that the links to the new site had not been updated. Well, I was bowled over when he offered to give me the lens and I hope I have done the lens justice.

As for Robbie Williams, I was cleaning out our goldfish tank and listening to the lunchtime news. An announcement was made about the former Take That singer getting married and decided to make a lens.

It is one of those stories that may well make a lot of headlines over the next few months, so it will be interesting to see what traffic it gets.

The only problem I had with the news that Squidoo was reviewing what to do with Groups was that the announcement came months ago and then nothing was heard for a long time. To be honest I had given up joining Groups long before the announcement from HQ because so many only seemed to exist so that the Group owner could do a heap of self-promotion.

However, last week all our Groups were converted into Lenses and put into WIP. I have tidied mine up sufficiently to now re-publish them as lensographies:

Weight Loss

Children and Parenting

Both are already ranking far higher than they ever did as Groups so I am very happy with the change.

And yes, your eyes are not deceiving you – one of them is about Weight Loss. I am still on my crusade to prove that dieting and weight loss lenses do have a place on Squidoo and that it IS possible to have lenses on this topic that are quality and not Spammy.

Had they been very big groups though I am not sure I would be quite so happy. Tidying up these two groups was very time consuming, despite them being very small but the improved Squidoo rankings make it all very worthwhile!

My Squidoo lens Bullying at Primary School has been my top performing lens almost since it was first published. And this week I was thrilled to receive an email from a Student asking permission to use Sparky’s Poem in an AntiBullying Document she is producing for Teachers to use.

Although it is great to see how popular the lens is, I always feel so sad when I think about what our daughter went through for such a long time. Writing the lens was therapy and it helps us to know that our experience is helping others.

However, what upsets me the most is that in a lot of cases, the Bullies are using “learned behaviour”. Many children who bully are themselves bullied at home. So in a way, although Bullying at School makes disturbing reading, I believe my other lens Does Bullying Run in Families? is even more heartbreaking.

Home should be the safest environment for any child – but sadly in some cases it is not. We had evidence that the girl who was bullying our daughter was herself being bullied by her own mother. People had seen the way she spoke to the child and she had a reputation for being verbally agressive and difficult to deal with. Yet, no one would listen to me when I raised the issue at my daughter’s school. All I got was awkward silences.

Not only did the school fail my daughter but they failed the bully as well.

Last year I wrote my Remembrance Day lens just three days before the event. It was 4 am and I could not sleep and I put it together in a couple of hours.

Squidoo traffic and some Squidoo Angel Blessings got it ranking fairly high but it was too late for Google traffic.

But this year, oh boy! Yesterday the lens broke all my Squidoo records – apart from highest ranking, which as I write remains at #13.

I broke the 1000 visits on one lens in a week barrier = 1155, which I have never done before (not even with my top lens Bullying at Primary School).

It also took my total visits over all my lenses in a week over 3000 = 3743.

I know that some of you have seen more traffic than this on some of your lenses, but I am chuffed to bits (translation = proud and happy)!

Come November every year and British Broadcasting icon Sir Terry Wogan is frequently in the news. The BBC Children in Need Appeal, will be broadcast this year on Friday 20 November, when millions of ££s will be raised for the children’s charity.

Terry Wogan has been presenting Children in Need since the 80s and says he will stop “when hell freezes over”. However, this is the year that Sir Terry will retire from his early morning BBC radio programme “Wake up to Wogan”, much to the dismay of his millions of fans.

To mark Terry Wogan’s retirement and the release of a new version of a famous song by The Beatles, which has been re-worked by Bandaged Together, to raise money for Children in Need, I have published two new lenses:

Terry Wogan and All You Need Is Love.

More lenses about Children in Need will follow.

Have finally got into a schedule with my writing on SquidLog and thanks to a suggestion from my lovely SquidPal Chef Keem I am finding a seemingly inexhaustible range of topics that expand on my area of particular interest: Squidoo Etiquette.

So far I have covered the Squidoo Angels, Twitter, the SquidU Forum and Multiple Accounts on Squidoo. Next week sees the turn of Guestbook Etiquette.

Recently I have also started up a new blog on Crabby’s Beach, where I am musing on Green and Enviromental issues. And this gave me the motivation to make a Lensography of my “green” lenses: Going Green Ideas.

Then I saw a Press Release, which was the inspiration for my newest lens: Love Never Dies. The sequel that Andrew Lloyd Webber has been struggling to write on and off for 15 years, is finally finished and we finally get to see what became of The Phantom of the Opera.

Is Andrew Lloyd Webber clever or insane to pen a sequel to the most successful Stage Musical of all time? You can have your say in the Duel Module on the Lens.

Yesterday saw the announcement of a new group of Angels on Squidoo. As far as I can see, only nine Angels remain from the cohort appointed in April and I am really proud to be one of them. This leaves 23 new haloes being polished up (or being retrieved from storage) ready to take to the Squidoo sky.

Following feedback received from the last group of Angels, each Angel will only have three categories to watch over this time around instead of five, which should make the task of helping the “cream rise to the top” less onerous. The new Squidoo Guidelines should also make things easier as lenses on various Squiddont topics are prevented from being published.

I must confess I did think long and hard before I applied to continue as an Angel. The job does have huge responsibilities. As Kimberly said:

These Angels are your new ambassadors to great things on Squidoo. They’ll be spending the next few months blessing great lenses, educating you on best practices, and spreading the word about how to use Squidoo. Look for them…everywhere!

And being “everywhere” does take up some time!

Having be re-appointed as an Angel, I thought it was time to check my Squidoo Angels lens and see if my views about what makes a Bless-worthy lens have changed. No, not really!

I also added a full list of all the Angels to my Squidoo Angel lens and was sad to note some very special people who have “retired” and other worthy applicants who were not successful this time around.

I now await with bated breath to see which categories I will be watching over this time around!