Second Lens of the Day & Stardance

Just before I got up this morning, I thought I should blog about my newest lens, The Stardance Project. I'll get to that, but first, once I had the computer up and running and pulled up email, I saw things had taken an unexpected turn. I noticed in the Squidoo folder that I had a whole bunch of comments, many more than the usual one or two I might see. Even with over 100 lenses, I don't get comments every day.

The first one was about my Celtic Music: Lenses lens, congratulating me on it being named Lens of the Day. Well, flabber my gast! I wasn't expecting that for a couple of reasons:

1. I'd gotten a Lens of the Day back on November 8, 2008 for my Spoonerisms lens.
2. I really haven't done much with the lens for a while, although I had redone it a few months ago.

On giving it a little thought, I suppose St. Patrick's Day has a lot to do with the lens being chosen, even though many of the performers aren't Irish. I also thought that this was a lens for which I'd put quite a bit of effort, using several coding tricks I'd picked up from other lensmasters: borders, background, drop caps and photo placement. I couldn't use the standard photo spot for text modules because of the borders and backgrounds because the standard placement puts the photo on the right margin but not quite at the top, so the border looks bad. So I had to drop the photos in using code.

Needless to say, it's an honor to get one Lens of the Day. To get two in such a relatively short time is amazing. I'm hoping that lots of people will take a look at the lens, but even more, I'm hoping they will go on and visit my other Celtic music lenses and discover more about Irish, Scottish and related music. One of the links close to the top of the lens is for the lensography I made for the series of lenses I did for Maggie's Music, so here's hoping that drives a bit of traffic to those lenses as well.

Speaking of St. Patrick's Day, LiveIreland.com will be doing live broadcasts starting at 10 in the morning Dublin time. (That means 3 in the morning for me out here on the Left Coast!)


Find more videos like this on liveIreland


Yesterday I published a lens for The Stardance Project, something Jeanne Robinson, wife of science fiction author Spider Robinson, has been working on. Jeanne was a dancer who not only did contemporary dance, she also was the founder and artistic director of the Nova Dance Company in Halifax, Nova Scotia from 1980 to 1987. She was the inspiration for Spider to start writing the novella "Stardance."

Spider usually writes alone, although when Jeanne saw a couple of things about dance that needed correcting, he made the corrections. When she commented about the main character, saying, "Shara wouldn't do that," he was all ready to rebut her, then realized she was right. "Pull up a chair," he said as he added her name to the byline. Check out the lens and the links on it for more about Stardance. It's fascinating and I hope the movie gets made.

A lot of the stuff on the lens was originally on the one I'd done for Spider. I've been revising that a bit at a time lately, adding backgrounds and using links to Amazon that go through my Amazon Associates ID. When I got to the part about the Stardance books, I realized all the info about the Stardance Project really belonged in its own lens. I went ahead and made the changes to the modules on the Spider lens, then when I started the Stardance lens it was fairly simple to copy things over. In the process, I made some changes and added more information.