Celtic Music for Christmas

My latest Squidoo lens is Celtic Music: Christmas. I went through my Celtic music lenses looking for Christmas CDs. I found fewer than I expected. A check on Amazon.com turned up some more, but most were compilations. I finally settled on featuring CDs by artists I've already got lenses for. I have a CD for Moya Brennan - An Irish Christmas - and while I don't have a lens for her solo albums, she was part of Clannad. The one compilation CD is related to a lens: A Thistle & Shamrock Christmas Ceilidh. Other artists include Loreena McKennitt, Enya, The Chieftains, Magical Strings, including a second CD for Philip Boulding, Golden Bough and Eileen Ivers. All the CDs are available from Amazon.co.uk, although Enya's Oiche Chiun (Silent Night) offered there is different from the version offered in the US. I also discovered that Enya has a new album with a holiday/winter theme, And Winter Came that I'll need to add to her lens.

I got the lens listed on Squidom.com where I've also been adding lenses for authors. It'll be interesting to see how much activity this Christmas-oriented lens generates over the next couple of months and where it ends up in the lens rankings. Last year I was too new to Squidoo to get in on making lenses for the holiday season.

Using Squidoo's new starting page for creating lenses, I forgot that it wants to put a hyphen between "celtic" and "music" in the URL, so the URL is stuck with it now. On all my other lenses its "celticmusic" including the lens I made the other day for Julie Fowlis, where I noticed the hyphen and took it out. It probably won't matter to anyone other than me, and it's not even a problem if I copy the URL from the browser address bar. I just have to remember if I'm typing it in manually. I had to go back to my Celtic Music: Lenses lens to correct it because I did type it in manually there, and of course the uncorrected link went to a default Squidoo page.

There's several things I have to do each time after I hit the Publish button to put up a new lens. I send out a Twitter tweet about it - usually one I type in to the twhirl application which is usually running on my desktop. I ping it using one of the SquidUtils from thefluffanutta, wait a few minutes, then ping it through Pingler.com, and then I blog about it on Blogger.com (MobyD's Soundings) which I then copy over to my blog on Delphiforums.com (Moby's Soundings). If I want to see a little quick traffic, I'll post about it in the SquidU discussion forums. For this Christmas lens, I may alter my forum signature to include a link. Oh yeah, it also helps to ping the blog entry too. If it's a Celtic music lens, I need to add a module to Celtic Music: Lenses, then publish, tweet and ping that lens as well.