On October 5th I gave my last Squidoo Angel blessing to Of Mood and Mind Surreal Original Paintings.

From September 1st to October 5th I blessed 180 lenses and some days it took literally hours to find just five I thought were exceptionally good – take a look at the full list of blessings.

In Squidoo’s forum there is a controversy about how Angels find lenses to bless. Should they consider those for which lensmasters ask a blessing? Should they look at lists of new lenses or use a search for different subjects? Does it matter how Angels find blessworthy lenses as long as the quality is high enough?

Personally, I don’t think it matters and the whole controversy is a storm in a teacup.

I did look at links to lenses posted in the old Angels’ forum but I never expected too much from them – usuallly quite rightly although occasionally I got a pleasant surprise but a page that truly deserved a blessing. I also looked at lenses posted in the forum or on Facebook. Mostly, though, I looked at lenses made by my fans and their fans. Then I would search by broad subject areas like ‘modernism’ or ’surrealism’ or ‘Italy’. It’s quite amazing the huge variety of topics that fall within these categories. With ‘modernism’ and ’surrealism’ I expected to get lenses about art but I got many others too including history and philosophy. Even putting ‘Italy’ into Squidoo’s search engine brought a huge variety: travel in Italy, Rome, Naples, Italian food, recipes, art, glass, and much more.

What happened to my own writing and Squidoo Lenses during my Angel period? Not a lot – I made one new page: Glazed Lemon and Almond Tart and that took several days when I should have done it in just a few hours. It was a recipe so nothing that involved a huge amount of work. As for existing lenses, many of them are in urgent need of updating because I didn’t do a few each day which is my normal routine.

In spite of this, I enjoyed being an Angel. I loved the pleasure and encouragement many people got from a blessing and I would do it again but not yet. I think I’d better get my own Squidoo work up to date with a few more new pages produced first.

Yesterday evening the gremlins were partying on Squidoo.

When I was updating a couple of lenses yesterday afternoon (UK time about 4 hours ahead of EST), it seemed that Squidoo was barely crawling and so I gave up. I don’t have the patience to wait several minutes for a page to load.

Then yesterday evening, around 10pm BST (British Summer Time), 6pm EST, I wanted to check the lens rank update which should have been done a few hours earlier. The Squidoo server was down. I went on to the Squidoo forum and others confirmed they couldn’t access Squidoo.

Bearing in mind the time in the USA, early evening or early afternoon depending on the time zone, this must have been hugely frustrating for Squids trying to make lenses or update them.

This morning, Squidoo was back online but there was a new problem, affecting a lot of lensmasters. As I usually do, I went to the Squidoo forum soon after switching on my computer and there were complaints from several well-respected Squids saying their accounts had been locked and they had received emails from Squidoo. They were told their lenses broke the terms of service and their accounts would be deleted in 30 days. They could, however, send an  email to a specific address asking for a hand review which it seems many of them have done.

It gets worse…

Their accounts were already deleted, they couldn’t access them at all. They hadn’t got their 30 days to stop it happening!

Because of the number of people affected, it’s obvious that there’s a gremlin in the system. It seems an over-sensitive ‘abuse’ filter is responsible for false positives so prompting sending out all the emails and shutting down accounts. They’re working on it and hopefully it will be fixed soon. One person has already been told his account can be reinstated as soon as the problems are solved.

It’s causing a lot of worry and distress for great lensmasters who have invested an enormous amount of time and effort into writing excellent lenses that comply with Squidoo’s terms of Service. Let’s hope it’s fixed very quickly.

7.7.2010 UPDATE

As usual, Squidoo responded to concern among Squids and sorted out the problems the day after I wrote this post. All of the lenses and accounts that had been erroneously caught by the spam filter were reinstated.

Back at the end of March I posted here New Squidoo Widgets – Absolutely Brilliant! I’m really pleased to report that it looks like I was right to be optimistic. After looking at stats and sales on Amazon.com, I’ve had sales of three books that appear in my right hand column Amazon Spotlight widget and several lenses are showing referrals from lenses with the Featured Sites widget, obviously I checked that links to the sites receiving traffic appear in the widgets.

I’ve been a bit lazy about using the Amazon Spotlight widget because I haven’t always wanted to spend time looking for products to appear in it. Now I’ve seen this, I’m definitely going to spend time gradually going through all my pages and putting this widget on and finding really relevant products.

I’ll report again, if and when I have more news.

Books for Research

Research of some kind is usually essential for all writers. I know that is a sweeping statement but, in my experience, it’s true.

No matter how well I know a subject, there are almost always facts that I need to check to ensure I’ve remembered them accurately. If a reader notices just one wrong fact then the rest of what you’ve written loses credibility.

Sometimes you might be commissioned to write an article about something you have no knowledge of at all. This happened to me some years ago. I’d contacted the editor of a monthly antiques magazine in the hope of being commissioned to write for it. She arranged to meet me and we had a very amicable chat. Then she dropped her bombshell. She said, “I’d like to commission you to write about the Aesthetic Movement. You are familiar with it, aren’t you?” I tried not to look blank and replied that I did know about it, lying through my teeth. I’d vaguely heard of it but couldn’t have said any more than that. The editor then told me the deadline was three weeks away.

I went home and panicked for an hour before I calmed down and started some heavy, intensive research. I looked online, of course, and bookmarked a number of relevant pages. I also went to the library and borrowed books on the subject. I spent about a week reading the references and making notes before starting to write. This story has a happy outcome. I had my article finished before the deadline, written almost exactly to the required number of words and it was used with almost no sub-editing. I also went on to be commissioned to write monthly articles for that magazine for several years.

If I hadn’t been prepared to put in the work researching the subject, I would have lost out on becoming a regular writer for that publication.

Usually, though, I know something, even quite a lot on occasions, about the subject of an article, Squidoo lens or web page I intend to write. Even so I find that preliminary research will throw up facts that I don’t know. Sometimes they are quirky or unusual things that add colour and depth to the article. Caution is needed, though. When I find a fact that I didn’t know, I always check it out from different sources. I don’t want to repeat somebody else’s mistake.

This is something I am very cautious about when doing any research. I never take my notes from just one source even when it’s the leading authority on the subject. There is always a danger of misunderstanding something and getting it wrong in my own writing. There is also the chance that I could subconsciously plagiarise text from my research source. By reading several different sources of information, I get different points of view, different opinions and sometimes a more complete overview. This can allow me to come to my own point of view so that I can write my own article on the subject from the standpoint of what I’ve learned about it. I don’t want to just regurgitate what I’ve read. I want to have an opinion or at least my own slant on the topic.

If you want to see one of my Squidoo pages that I had to do from research with little prior knowledge, take a look at Local Time and Railway Time.

Picture above: Copyright © Twice25 – Creative Commons License

New Squidoo widgets in the right hand column of the lens

Sometimes I’m so happy I’m one of the Giants on Squidoo because we get to test new widgets and other stuff that TPTB think will improve the overall look of lenses or the ease of making them. I’ve fallen in love with the latest ones: widgets that enable the lensmaster to add content to the right hand column. Before the advent of these widgets, we could only use a small portion of that column right at the top.

There are four different kinds of widgets: Amazon Spotlight, Featured Lenses, Squidcasts RSS, and Blogs RSS.

So far, I’ve only experimented with them on three or four lenses but I intend to work right through my lenses, adding appropriate widgets. For example, I think the best place to use the Blog RSS is on one of my Squidoo Tips lenses: Make a Reader Friendly Lens, Squidoo Lenses: Quickly and Efficiently, and Squidoo Lenses: Using Pictures Effectively. Considering that I mostly write about various aspects of Squidoo here, anybody who finds those three lenses worth reading, might like to read some of this blog too.

I think using the Amazon Spotlight in the right hand column is brilliant. It looks really good there without poking the visitor in the eye with the fact it’s an advertisement. To avoid highlighting that it’s trying to sell something, it should promote a product that is absolutely relevant to the subject of the lens. That way it looks like additional, useful information. I believe the same applies to links to lenses, they should be relevant to the topic of the lens too. The Squidcasts widget is an excellent way to highlight recent additions and improvements to a lens, particularly one that needs to be updated frequently because it’s a newsworthy subject.

So what’s the downside? The only one I could see is that we can only use three widgets on each lens, have only three links to featured lenses and I believe we can’t choose how many lines are included in the RSS.

I’m so sad that these  compliments gave me a real lift even though they came from two elderly women and not two hunky guys. Oh well, when you reach 60, you have to take your compliments where you can find them. The sad truth is that at my age there are very few ’suitable’ men that are attractive. Who wants a man that has to take his teeth out to clean them or needs to clip the hair in his nose and ears more often than the little that remains on his head?

As part of the baby boomer generation, I don’t feel my age. I’m still 28 inside – probably the age I had most fun. I haven’t started putting a blue rinse on my hair but I do use ultra violet instead and a colour called Dragons Blood on my nails. I’ve always been outrageous and dressed in my own style and I continue to do that.

Thank goodness I lost the weight I put on in my 50s. If I was fat, I’d look really ridiculous! That was the only time I dressed like other people because I didn’t want to be noticed. I hated being overweight.

I can remember when I was a child and teenager and somebody of 60 seemed ancient. They dressed in old-fashioned ways and just behaved like old people. At least the ones I knew did. I guess being in our 60s has crept up on my generation. We never thought it would happen to us and now we reject the idea of being old.

The carpet in the hall needs shampooing, the net curtains could do with a quick rinse through, the inside of the windows at the back need cleaning – they’re not desperate, you can still see out of them! These are not hard jobs that will take ages, just boring.

I’m going away to my best friend’s tomorrow for New Year so I think they will all have to wait till I come home. Then I’ll go into a cleaning frenzy, soap suds and fresh smells everywhere.