The Moment of Zen Theme on Squidoo

Squidoo has updated its default template with a nicer shade of blue and better overall design. Not only that, lensmasters now have a choice of another seven themes with different colours.

The lenses look much better. I really like the new designs. The choice of themes means we can reflect the character of the subject of the lens now. For example, I wrote a lens called Should Art and Antiques be Restored or Not? I feel that it’s what is sometimes called a ‘think piece’ so I’ ve used the theme Moment of Zen which gives it the appearance of a newspaper article. I think it works with this kind of lens – of course, you might totally disagree.

Because I like the look of the new template so much, it has given me the  kick up the backside I needed to go through some of my lenses and remove the ugly ‘blackbox’ and ’speech bubble’ that I used for quotations with a coded box. I’ve still got to go through a lot more lenses to replace all of them but at least I’ve made a start – something I’ve been meaning to do for months. You can see the difference by looking at Tea – Black or Green where I have put in the new coded box (you don’t have to scroll down far) and then look at St Paul’s Cathedral, London. If you don’t want to look at the lens, just go to “If you seek his monument, look around you” halfway down the Contents menu at the top. There you can see what is called the ‘blackbox’ although it’s blue in this case.

Considering the amount of work that must have gone into the new design and themes, the implementation went surprisingly well yesterday. There were a few minutes when the new stylesheet had apparently not been uploaded but the rest of the files had. This caused some panic and a rush to the forum to find out what was going on. It was quickly fixed, though, and the general consensus today seems to be that the new design and themes are great even if there are a few details that need to be fixed or changed.