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.