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.

Squidoo user names, the ones that appear on every lens as well as the lensmaster’s page, can tell us something about the person behind the name.

Many people, myself included, use a nom de plume and there can be many reasons for this. When I joined Squidoo, I predominantly wrote elsewhere and I wanted to keep the two activities totally separate so I chose the name ‘Stazjia’ for my writing on Squidoo. I did, however, put my real name in my information. I didn’t feel it was absolutely imperative to conceal my identity.

I can understand, though, why some people do feel it is essential. The reasons can be many and varied. Someone might be shy about their writing or perhaps write on a controversial subject and don’t want to become involved in arguments with people they know. One lensmaster writes about real life experiences of bullying affecting children she knows. She carefully conceals her identity and hometown to avoid any chance of anyone working out which children she writes about.

More recently, there has been an upsurge in strange user names. They are names like ‘malwareRus’ or ‘earn$$$quick’ or ‘gameboys-cheap’. These are names I’ve just made up and I hope they give you the idea of the kind I am talking about. Apparently advice has been appearing online and in e-books telling people to join Squidoo with a name that reflects the products they are going to write about in an attempt to add keywords to increase the chances of appearing high in Google searches.

I don’t know whether this strategy works with Google but I do know that I would never buy anything from somebody with this kind of spammy name. To me, it just screams SPAM and ‘don’t believe a word of this because I want you to buy something’. I’ve also noticed the content of pages posted in the Critique Me forum with these sort of names are, nine times out of ten, just copied and pasted from the original spammy page – against Squidoo’s Terms of Service.

My advice is ‘Give up the spam’ because it doesn’t work. There are too many people on the web who are far better than amateurs taking silly advice to use Squidoo like this. The network is also getting far better at detecting spam pages and closing them down. If you want to earn money online, honest, interesting content works better because most people can recognise spam for what it is.

I hope none of you are working on new Valentine’s Day lenses or web pages right now. You’ve almost certainly left it too late to get much profitable traffic this year, if you are.

Easter, though, is nine weeks away. This gives you time to get a lens or two online. You’ll have time to choose a good subject, hopefully one that puts a slightly different spin on the usual Easter eggs and little bunny rabbits. You don’t want to compete head-on with the top Easter pages, do you? Maybe you know about some Easter customs unique to your area, or your family has its own traditions or recipes for the festival.

The good thing is, you have time to look for a different perspective. To try to give you some ideas for thinking laterally, here are three top-ranking Squidoo lenses about Easter:

Easter Music for Your Church Choir – it doesn’t have a lot of original content but it’s a great resource for anybody looking for Easter music.

Simple & Affordable Little Girls’ Easter Dresses For Spring & Summer – I would never have thought of writing about Easter dresses for little girls but it’s a great idea.

Painting Wooden Easter Eggs – the lensmaster tells us about her family custom of painting wooden eggs for Easter and she also tells us how to do it.

Can you think of something about Easter that will rank highly on Squidoo and, better still, get picked up by Google and other search engines?

Default logo and text on Squidoo Lens

I see many lenses by newcomers to Squidoo that are spoilt because they haven’t bothered to fill in their biography or put in a picture to represent themselves.

On the right you can see the orange blob and “Hello world. This is my bio. I can edit it later.”

This is what you get when you haven’t bothered to provide a picture of yourself or an avatar to represent you and don’t put in a little basic information. It doesn’t look good, does it? I’ve blotted out the lensmaster’s name to avoid embarrassment.

It looks lazy at best or as if you have something to hide at worst. On Squidoo, most people are either imparting information or trying to sell something, sometimes both. How can you expect anybody to trust what you tell them if you hide your identity behind an orange blob? If you can’t be bothered to edit your bio and apparently are happy to tell everybody this, how can anybody trust you to make sure that what you write is accurate?

I believe that all newcomers to Squidoo should add a picture and some information before they make their first lens. It doesn’t take long. If you don’t want to use a picture of yourself, you can use a cartoon or some other picture as long as you aren’t infringing somebody else’s copyright. Use a picture of your dog, cat, hamster, or goldfish. Some people use pictures of themselves as babies or a back view. Use a picture of some scenery.

Almost anything will do as long as you use it on all your lenses so people can quickly recognise it. Your lensmaster picture is like your logo.

The point is to take an idea that is very wide ranging and think of your own slant on it. There is no way that anybody could write a comprehensive lens or web page about the moon or time. Both subjects are too big.

When you are stuck for something to write about, make a list of subjects. This is a brainstorming exercise so don’t think hard about it and agonise about what you add to the list. Just put down anything that pops into your head. When you have ten or twenty topics, look at the first five items on your list and, one at a time, work through them thinking of all the angles you could write about on each subject.

Example: The Sky

1. Airplanes
2. Clouds
3. Storms
4. Hurricanes or tornadoes
5. Birds
6. Myths about the sun and/or moon
7. The night sky and prominent constellations
8. Why the sky appears blue
9. Parachuting
10. Earth’s atmosphere

Here are ten different ideas for lenses or web pages from the general topic of ‘The Sky’.

I did it. I finished up with 108 lenses and I was notified on Thursday that I had made it into the Giant 100 Club.

I really didn’t expect to qualify. I wasn’t convinced that I’d really got 100 high quality lenses. I wanted to do at least another five or six to give myself a better chance. I always do my best when I write but we aren’t always the best judges of our own work.

What has helped me so much more than when I made Giant with 50 lenses is being part of the Wiwon Squidoo team. Each time I made a new lens I posted the URL in the forum and other members would give me opinions and suggestions about it. This sounds scary but it’s incredibly helpful. Sometimes you don’t realise the mistakes you’ve made or the way some things are badly phrased because you know what you meant when you wrote them.

Other people giving you suggestions and catching typos and poor phrasing has been a big help. In fact, I have joined another group as well, the Senior Squids, and find this is good too.

These smaller Squidoo groups are, I believe, a good way to proceed. The network is outstanding for the sense of community among lensmasters and the small groups take this another step further.

Before I close this post, I have a bit more bragging to do – my lens, I Had a Mini-Stroke and What Happened After, was awarded a purple star the day after I made the Giant 100 Club so last week was a really great week for me.

It was good for me because it made me concentrate on writing quickly and not spending too long agonising about which subjects to choose. I have a terrible habit of starting a lens then deciding I don’t like what I’ve written and I’ve lost interest in the subject so I delete it.

A Favourite Climbing Plant

I’ve been pleased with the look of some of my recent lenses like My Favourite Climbing Plants, Best Desserts on Twitter and I Love Lilies. I’ve been lucky to find some really lovely pictures to illustrate them. Sometimes I spend more time looking for pictures than I do writing a lens.

The last one, I Love Lilies, was done in response to a Senior Squids weekly challenge. I wish I’d taken a more active part in Senior Squids earlier because I’m sure it would have helped me with making lenses for the Giant 100 Club but I was like the person pushing a bike who is late – I didn’t have time to get on it and pedal!

That’s the brilliant thing about Squidoo, there is such a great, supportive community willing to help. You never need to feel you are struggling on your own.

The Dark is Rising Sequence

I now have a total of 92 lens on Squidoo and I need well over 100 to give myself a chance of making the Giant 100 Club because the definition is 100 outstanding lenses and not all of mine might qualify as outstanding.

I’m going to do the best I can in the time I have left – just 30 days as the final date is June 30th. If I don’t have the required number of the right standard by then, I will have to wait till the end of September to apply again. I have decided that I won’t beat myself up if I don’t do it this time, though. That way I won’t be so prone to the ‘headless chicken’ syndrome – going crazy doing nothing because I have so much to do that I can’t make up my mind what to concentrate on!

I’m a bit disappointed that lenses I think are good don’t do well and haven’t been picked up by Google. One of these is The Dark is Rising Sequence, a series of fantasy novels for children that I think are as good as the Harry Potter ones. I read them when I was in my 30s even though, since I’ve been an adult,  I’ve never made a habit of reading children’s novels but these captured my imagination.

I wrote about a series of books for adults, The Revelation Space Universe. After I read the first book, I found the series compulsive. It’s proper science fiction, not fantasy, so maybe not as universally popular as other best selling books. I defy anybody who like sci-fi to read one of these novels without wanting to read the rest immediately!

Another lens that doesn’t get the traffic I think it should is The Historic City of Bath, England. It’s got lots of pictures of Bath plus some videos taken in the city. I’ve also written about its history and the places to visit there. I live fairly close to Bath and, before I moved last year, I lived just 12 miles away. My dentist was there and it was the place we went when we wanted more than just basic food shopping. I know it well and I love the city. I hope that comes through in what I’ve written about it.

Oh well, next month I’ll go through the lenses that don’t do so well and either delete them or try to assess what’s wrong with them. Doing that isn’t as interesting as writing something new but I’m wasting the work I’ve already done if I don’t try to make them more popular.

Since I made Giant with fifty lenses at the beginning of last October, I needed a break and was fresh out of ideas for new subjects for lenses. The incentive was one of my Squidoo friends, Willow, was one of the Angels who had started one of the teams for aspiring Giants or Giant 100s. It is a competition between teams so I joined hers – Willow’s Wonder Squids. Now I have a responsibility to the team to reach the 100 lens target.

Since signing up for the team I’ve done three new lenses:

1. Care for Antique & Collectible Glass
2. Antiques & Collectibles of the Future
3. Should Art & Antiques be Restored or Not?

You can follow the team’s progress because members add their new lenses to this page as they write them.

The inimitable Drifter has even done our team its own fan page – Willow and the Wonders: The Best Giant Greeter Team Ever. Just the title tells you Drifter is the master of understatement and this page doesn’t disappoint. In fact, it’s probably got some members of other teams a little riled. Never mind, it adds to the fun.

On Squidoo, I’ve written about some great artists and designers like Charles Rennie Macintosh, William Morris, and Susie Cooper and I couldn’t find a group for designers and design. This is why I decided to start the Squidoo Art and Design Group.

I wanted to bring together excellent lenses and I am quite strict about which ones are accepted for the group. I’d rather have fewer members but a high standard. Currently, there are 110 lenses and I’ve probably rejected three times that number.

I spell out categorically the criteria for acceptance but it is amazing how many people either don’t bother to read them or ignore them. If they don’t meet those criteria, I don’t accept them so people are wasting their own time as well as mine.

Here are three of my favourites. Unique Chess Sets by the Frankster shows some amazing chess pieces. I particularly like the set where one side is made up of a variety of cats and the other of dogs – much more interesting than black versus white. I also like Trollbead History Since 1976. I’d never even heard of trollbeads before I saw this lens and now I’m consumed by an urge to have some of my own. The last one of my three is How to Make a Wooden Canvas. This is a great step by step guide illustrated with many good photographs. Even I think I could make one after reading this. I also love the pictures of the painted wooden panels at the end. Not only does the lensmaster, Buffalokid, have the most magnificent moustache and is a good craftsman, he’s a gifted artist too.

These are just three of the great lens in the Art and Design Group. I hope you’ll visit and see some of the others.