Best Sellers

Each week on Friday evening or Saturday morning (sometimes both), I update my Squidoo lens based on The New York Times Best Sellers list. I don't usually blog about it, but it seems like a good idea this time because recently the Yahoo search engine changed the way it lists web pages. The changed caused just about all Squidoo lenses to disappear from their listings. Unfortunately, the Best Seller lens was getting a fair amount of its visits through Yahoo's search. Once they changed things around April 7, the lens started sliding down in lensrank. Last week, even adding Kindle links on Friday and publishing the lens, then updating it on Saturday morning - two updates in two days, didn't halt the lens' slide.

It can take an hour or two to update the lens each week, depending on how many new books are on the list, because along with getting the new rankings from the newspaper's website and the information from Amazon plugged in for links, I write a blurb for each new book. Each description is in a box with a colored border and background, with the colors matching those on the book covers. (I wanted to show an example of an entry, and it looked OK in a preview, but it didn't work when I published this entry.)

It all took some figuring out with revisions happening over the months since I started the lens back last July 30. It really doesn't look too much like it did back then. I've learned a lot about HTML and CSS in figuring out how to make the lens look good. It was doing quite well for a while until the Yahoo search thing happened, so it's been disheartening to see it slipping over the past few weeks. One reason for blogging about it is to create a link that search engines will see, and just maybe Yahoo might pick up the listing again.

In seeing what's been happening with Yahoo, I've done some searches there for my Mount St. Helens lens, which used to get a fair amount of its traffic from that search engine. I can find several results for places where the lens is mentioned and linked, but not the lens itself. Very strange.

Catching Up

I didn't realize it had been over three weeks since my last blog post! Several things have been happening, mostly Squidoo related.

Not long after my last post I was named a Squidoo Angel. What that means is I get to see what new lenses have been submitted in several categories (which I'll keep confidential) so I can look them over. A lot of them are very new from new people, and often they were published too soon. Sometimes I'll see some pretty good stuff.

If I spot a really good lens, existing or new, I have the option to give it what's known as a Squid Angel blessing, which gives it a boost in lensrank, although that does fade over time. It's nice to find a really good lens and go beyond just giving it a five star rating and making it a favorite. A blessing is sort of like a sixth star, although I think it gives more of a boost.

On the other hand, if a lens is really bad I can ding it, which will push the lensrank down. It's not about the subject matter usually but more about how well the lens is made. Subject matter enters into the equation only if it's spammy or violates Squidoo's Terms of Service. I've been finding quite a few of those, but that's partly because I've been looking for them. I've gotten to know a lot better lately the Terms of Service and what Squidoo doesn't want to see as lens subjects.

Part of what Angels do is look over the top 100 lenses in the categories we've been assigned with an eye out for lenses that shouldn't be there like ones that are spammy and violate TOS. I spotted several in my first week, but with other Angels also looking at the lists with that in mind, they're not found as frequently.

Early on I went looking for lenses linking to sites offering illegal music, movie and game downloads. Most such sites like that charge people to join, then give them software so they can pirate stuff online. The software is available free, so really people who join are paying out money to do something illegal that, if they really want to do it, they can do for free.

Suddenly, A New Celtic Music Lens

I was poking around in Squidaholic checking out some stuff on one of my Celtic music lenses. While looking at links to Celtic music sites in general, I saw one from Portland's newspaper The Oregonian that mentioned a Celtic duo would be playing at a library. At first I thought maybe it was an old article, but I clicked on the link anyway and found out The Muses are playing Saturday afternoon. I hadn't heard of them before, but I figured since it's at a library, it's free, and close enough for me to go.

Then I had the idea to check out CD Baby and see if they had any CDs listed there. They did, so I pulled up their website to see how many CDs were listed both there and on CD Baby. It turns out all of them are in both places, so that meant I should make a lens. I put together a new template for lenses with CDs that are only on CD Baby after checking Amazon and seeing none of their CDs there. With that done, putting together a lens only took a couple of hours. Templates really save time!

I've published the lens, and I think it looks good enough, but I intend to add more to it after I get back from their show tomorrow. I'll take my camera along and get some pictures to add along with some additional text.

I checked out the latest online copy of their newsletter and learned they're on Twitter, so I added them to the people I'm following, and re-tweeted my message about the new lens to them. I'm hoping they'll see it before the show.

Update: Tanya got my tweet and replied. She checked out my Spoonerisms lens. Turns out she and Matthew are friends of Terry Foy, aka Zilch the Torysteller, who I featured in that lens.

That's the Signpost Up Ahead...

A few days ago I happened to notice that Squidoo lenses about the Twilight movie, based on books by Stephenie Meyer, tend to rank pretty high. Seeing the word "Twilight" reminded me of Rod Serling's great TV series The Twilight Zone. It occurred to me to do a search of Squidoo to see if anyone had done a lens about it yet.

I was a bit surprised when all I found was a video showcase lens that uses the YouTube module in thumbnail mode to present videos for a few episodes. The thumbnail mode means people are drawn away from the lens to view the vids. Like most video showcases (even mine, but I often have other lenses related to the showcases with more info) there wasn't a whole lot of content about the TV show itself. So I decided to do a lens.

I was pleased to find out "the-twilight-zone" ending for the lens URL was available, so I was off to a good start. This time I didn't start out adding DVDs and books. I left that to near the end. First I wrote the content. Wikipedia had several pages about the show and Serling. There were other sites as well, and I have an aging copy of The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows.

There wasn't much available in the way of copyright-free images, but I did find one of Serling that at least claimed to be public domain. I needed more, so I found one of an artist's mannequin, gave it a black background and put little white dots in the background to simulate stars, then rotated the image to about the angle the mannequin in the opening sequence of the show appears in. I also found an eyeball image to modify.

The show was in black and white, so I used grey/silver backgrounds. Where I used borders, I made them black. Normally I wouldn't do that, but considering the show wasn't in color, it works.

The lens also covers the movie and the other two series, one from the 1980s and the other that ran only one season on UPN in 2003-2004. For Amazon stuff, I've got the "definitive" boxed set of 156 remastered episodes, the movie, and four books about the show.

I'm wondering if anyone will stumble into the lens while looking for stuff about the Twilight movie.

Molly's Revenge and Enya Revised

It looks like getting another Celtic music lens — Celtic Music: Kim Robertson — published was a good idea to boost the rank of Celtic Music: Lenses. This morning the latter showed up at the number 8 position. That didn't get it on the bottom of everyone's dashboard, however. I think that might be reserved for lenses that are in the top 10 over the previous month. We'll see.

Today I've added Celtic Music: Molly's Revenge. They're a group from California known for their lively performances on stage with bagpipes, guitar, fiddle, whistles, bodhran and vocals. Mostly they perform in California, although they do make it up to Oregon and Washington once or twice a year and have gone farther afield. This past January they performed at the Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow, Scotland. They were joined by Moira Smiley, a vocalist and accordion player who performs with them on occasion and is on their latest album.

Getting the modules for the CDs done went quickly since there are only seven CDs and I'd just worked extensively in the same format yesterday. Often the hardest part of a lens is writing about the performers. Sometimes I've done that first to get it out of the way, but this time I did it last, partly because although I wanted to do a lens about Molly's Revenge, I've never seen them live and don't yet have any of their CDs. They do have videos on YouTube, so I was able to get some feel for their performances, and I thought it was impressive that they'd traveled from California to Scotland for the Celtic Connections event.

This afternoon I got an email from someone in the UK who had visited my Enya video showcase. He said he wasn't able to view any of the videos and wondered if it had anything to do with him being in the UK. I went to the lens and started clicking on the videos. Out of the ten, not one came up. All said they'd been removed from YouTube for copyright reasons. As the visitor said, the lens had lost the very reason for its existence.

While I considered deleting the lens since none of the Celtic music video showcases have ever rated very well, I thought I'd see if there were any Enya videos left on YouTube. At first glance, I saw a bunch that used Enya's music to go with pictures or their own video. Then I spotted the EnyaTV channel, which had added five videos about four months ago. It's got Enya's official OK, so they're probably going to be up for a good long while. When I first called up the channel, I saw a link to another channel called EnyaFanClub, started by someone in Russia. That channel had videos of TV appearances Enya has made. Some of them are songs and some were interviews and documentaries.

I replaced the ten YouTube videos, which I'd done using YouTube Plexo modules to avoid the thumbnails. Plexos allow people to vote, but I wasn't particularly interested in that (and neither were visitors; I don't think anyone ever voted). In their place I used seventeen video modules which have larger screens than the standard YouTube module or the Plexo module.

New Lens - Celtic Music: Kim Robertson

I probably should have been making new Celtic music lenses ever since my Celtic Music: Lenses lensography got chosen as Lens of the Day for March 16. It's been holding fairly steady at a rank overall of either 12 or 13 since March 19, and was at 17 on March 18. It's the first lens I've ever had in the top 100. My Spoonerisms lens topped out at 114. But I still haven't cracked the top 10 overall on Squidoo.

I know, I shouldn't be greedy, perhaps, but a lens in the top 10 gets listed at the bottom of every lensmaster's Squidoo dashboard - the place where all lenses and their ranks and ratings, etc. are listed, so most people look there frequently if they're on Squidoo. I usually have mine up whenever the computer is on.

Today I made a lens for Celtic harpist Kim Robertson. I have four of her CDs, so it's about time I made a lens for her. A lot of her CDs are on CD Baby, so if anyone buys a CD from their by using my links I'll make a buck per disk.

Kim Robertson has been recording for over 20 years, so there are quite a few CDs listed on the lens. So it took most of the day to get the lens made. I developed some new variations on HTML and CSS code because I needed to get links for Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and CD Baby in the same module. I thought it would be easy, but the link buttons kept showing up in strange places or they weren't quite aligned. It took a lot of trial and error to work that out. Once I got that, though, things went quicker.

It would have been nice to put the link buttons in a simple table so they could be evenly spaced across the bottom of each module, but Squidoo has limitations on coding. Tables have to be within a paragraph tag and you can't put one of those inside another.

Once I thought I was done, I published the lens. In order to see what the lens will look like, you have to publish it. A couple of things came up once I'd published. Originally I had the CD title in the module title space and again inside the text box which has a border and background. After publishing, I decided that didn't look right, so I replaced the second title with smaller text that states the recording label name and the year the CD was released. After I'd done that, I got the feeling that I hadn't included all the CDs I own. I checked and I'd only included one, probably because CD Baby doesn't carry any of them and Amazon only stocks one, with the others available through third party sellers. So I had to add them.

Once all that was done, I posted something in SquidU's Critique Me forum. Then I remembered I had to update the Celtic Music: Lenses lens to include the new one. And then, of course, there's this post to do as part of getting the word out.

Squidoo's Star Rating System

Squidoo has a rating system for lenses that allows logged-in people to choose a rating of between one and five stars. Today in the SquidU forum I saw a message from someone who apparently had a lens with some ratings that weren't five stars. So I replied with the following:

There's not a whole lot you can do about ratings other than try to make a good lens. People who visit the lens and rate it do it according to their own thoughts and feelings about a lens. If you look at the popup boxes that tell you what the star ratings mean, you'd see:

1 - I can do better
2 - Jury's out
3 - Pretty darn good
4 - Splendiferous
5 - Awesometastic

If people were rating by those descriptions, there would be a lot more 3 and 4 star ratings. But a culture has developed on Squidoo that highly encourages - you could say practically forces - people to rate with 5 stars or not at all. Within that culture, 4 stars is considered to be not good. Only 5 stars will do.

This is not what the people who developed the star rating system intended.

But not everyone got the memo about "5 stars or nothing," so they'll see a lens they think is pretty good and give it 3 stars. They'll see a lens which is better but not really outstanding and give it 4 stars. They're just being honest, not realizing they're "supposed" to give a lens 5 stars if they rate at all.

The only star rating I can see as honestly being not good is 1 star: "I can do better." 2 is so-so. 3 should be an acceptable rating if you take its description literally. 4 should be high praise and 5 should be reserved for the truly great lenses that people find extremely helpful, informative, useful or entertaining depending on the nature of the lens.

I don't like the "5 stars or nothing" approach that seems to be the norm for Squidoo, but I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, be a party pooper, a curmudgeon, a downer, etc. so I usually do what everyone else does and give 5 stars or none. But that means I rate fewer lenses because I really don't want to give 5 stars to lenses that are fair to good and strictly speaking deserve a 2, 3 or 4 star rating.

If I were to take the star descriptions literally and rate accordingly, people who saw the effects of my less-than-5 ratings would take it as evidence they were doing something wrong or they'd figure someone doesn't like them and is being punitive.