Squidoo Glitches Lead to Punnery Changes

The folks at Squidoo are always making changes, and occasionally they end up not being quite as behind-the-scenes as they might like. Today, when the lens rankings updated in the morning, I was startled to find my lens The Punnery had somehow rocketed from somewhere around 15,000 to 536. It would only have been the second time one of my lenses has made it into the top 1,000 on Squidoo. The first was Girls With Slingshots, and that was due to a link on the webcomic's page courtesy of Danielle Corsetto, the comic's creator.

Usually there's a good reason, but I couldn't figure it out. Since I'd updated The Punnery on Have Pun Will Travel to add posts from several of my old GEnie friends, I hadn't done all that much with it. The lens is intended as a guide to the HPWT version of The Punnery. I checked the stats to see if there were a lot of visitors, even though that didn't seem to be the case. I Googled "punnery" and found my lens on the first page, but while that's nice, it didn't answer anything.

I decided to just let it be and took a trip into town to visit Powells Books. That was a successful trip as I was looking for Tony Hillerman's earlier books. When I'd moved here in 2000, I'd only brought along his books I had in hardcover. Today I got three omnibus volumes covering his first nine Navajo Tribal Police mysteries, plus two others to complete my collection of those mysteries.

Returning home, I checked my Squidoo dashboard and found the lens rankings were different. My Sarah Vowell lens was back on top as it has been for several days now thanks to her new book, The Wordy Shipmates, released earlier this month, and The Punnery was ranked at 9,672, which seems more reasonable and marks its first time in the top 10,000.

With The Punnery moving up in the ranks, I took another look and found there was nothing in the lens that would generate any income other than what I'd get due to its standing in the lens rankings and the associated sharing of ad revenue, which usually amounts to pennies a month, although lenses that average in the top two tiers can make somewhat more. So I decided that since Richard Lederer, author of several books on puns and many more books about the English language, had been the unofficial guru of those of us who gathered in The Punnery on GEnie, I'd add some of his books. I also realized a couple of videos had disappeared somehow, so I had to search them out and add them again.