Friday, December 28, 2007

Hugo Awards Lenses Completed

For anyone reading my archives, please note that the Hugo Award lenses, except the one for Movies and TV, were replaced by one multi-page lens, Hugo Award Winners: Novels in January 2011. Links to the old lenses in these blog posts no longer work.

After two more days, I've got all the Squidoo lenses for the Hugo Awards completed. I completed both the 1960s and the 1950s today, after not getting very far yesterday. Guess I just needed a break, since I've done a fair amount on them since I started last Saturday.

I was determined today to get at least the 1960s, with its ten blurbs and addition of links for the nominees done. Once I'd done that, though, I only had five more blurbs for the '50s and four links for the 1959 nominees. No nominees have been listed prior to that year, simplifying completion of the final lens in the series. Once I got all the links done, I completed the voting modules, which Squidoo calls "plexos" (don't ask me where that came from). Then once they were published, I voted on the books I'd read.

I found a Squidoo group for "hard SF" and submitted my lenses to it. I think there were only 16-18 lenses before my additions, so I have no idea if that will help boost my ratings, but it seems a good idea to submit lenses to groups for at least some exposure.

I've found that on Squidoo, a lot of people put stuff up fast with minimal original input. Squidoo starts a page with several basic modules, and with some, it's possible to let sites like Amazon or YouTube determine the content, which sometimes results in odd and/or irrelevant choices. In my lenses, I've tried to add something of my own. Granted, on the Hugo lists, the choice of books was predetermined by the awards and nominations, but I did add blurbs for the winners, and made links to Amazon that show the book covers.

I hope people will visit the lenses. Here's a link for the lens for 2000-2007. You'll see links to the others on the right side as you scroll down.

It appears I got lucky with having the first three lenses I put up getting Stumbled. Since then, the other three have gotten a few visits, about what I would normally expect. But the three Stumbled lenses cracked the 10,000 mark, which none of my other lenses prior to that had done. One of the Hugo lenses is in the 2,000s.

I've started trying out designs for the website pages. I'm getting the impression that traffic to Have Pun Will Travel is nearly nonexistent, but that could change. I'm left wondering if the time I spent getting The Punnery online will end up benefiting anyone other than myself and the few other folks who I'm still in touch with from those days. It's been interesting putting it all together, but sometimes I wonder if it would have been just as good a use of my time if I'd spent it doing a model of the Taj Mahal in Legos. And I'm not even a Legos person.

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