Über Squidoo Stuff
Superhero Contest Runner Up
I know this is a bit late, but my family’s been having a tough week (a family member passed away) so I’ve been hanging out with and supporting them for most of this week. On July 14 I received an email from Anne Reidy, who is the Nonprofit Organizer for Squidoo. She informed me that one of my recently-made Superhero lenses, about Ben Carson, was chosen as one of five runners up for the Squidoo Superhero Charity Project.
Originally, they picked five great Superhero lenses and donated $500 to charity for each one, but I guess that they decided it’d be fun to pick some runners up. The email I got from Anne said:
We’re big softies. We couldn’t pick just five:
http://blogs.squidoo.com/lensoftheday/
Happy to say that Ben Carson makes the list!Please let me know where you would like the $100 donation to go. And please send me your snail mail address as we have a special surprise for you!
Thanks and congrats!
Anne
Wow! I was floored when I read this. I never thought I’d win, and I didn’t really build the Superhero lenses hoping that I’d win. I just did it for fun and to kind of give back a little of what I’ve been given. I was even more surprised when I saw that I’d be getting a super special awesome surprise in the mail. I’ll keep on the lookout and let you know what I get when I get it. 
In case anyone wants to know, I had the $100 donation sent to Save the Children.
Also, while looking at that Lens of the Day blog post, I noticed that three of the Superhero runners-up are regular chatters in the Captain Squid Chat Room. I thought that was pretty neat! If you haven’t done so yet, you’d better swing by sometime and say hello. We’ve got a great community there with some amazing people and lots of innovation and thinking going on!
Squidoo Enhanced Firefox Addon
The extremely talented Squidoo programming guru, thefluffanutta, has created an amazing tool for the Firefox web browser. Squidoo Enhanced improves the Squidoo usability experience by adding lots of cool new features to the Lens Workshop, dashboard, and other pages on Squidoo.
Some of the features include:
- Checks tags and color-codes them by number of lenses
- Counts tags, and links to traffic stats and the Wordtracker keyword tool
- Increases the height of text edit boxes
- Makes the workshop the full width of published lenses
- And more…click here for a full list
Squidoo Enhanced has been a big help in my Squidoo journey, and I would have had a much harder time without it. I know that my Squidoo traffic has increased significantly because of the suggestions this tool has made, and it’s saved me a lot of time and trouble.
Anyways, installing the addon is a breeze. All you have to do is:
- Download and install Mozilla Firefox Web Browser, if you don’t already have it
- Install the Greasemonkey Plugin for Firefox
- Restart Firefox
- Install the Squidoo Enhanced Script here
- Go to your Lensmaster Dashboard and enjoy!
Additionally, there is another SquidUtils addon script that cleans up the SquidU forum, removes some of the clutter, and adds some more goodies. You can find it here.
Kudos to thefluffanutta!
Who’s Your Superhero?
Last night I finished my first lens for the Superhero Project, which is a contest sponsored by Squidoo where all of the proceeds go to charity. Basically everyone makes five lenses in two weeks and then submits them to Squidoo, and HQ picks the best five and then awards $500 to charity for each winning lens. So $2,500 would go to charity because of this project.
I really admire Squidoo for making the option available to contribute to charity like this, and of course for the lensmasters who donate their time and work toward a good cause. Contests like the Superhero Project are not only loads of fun, they also make me feel good when I build lenses that will support people who need help.
Anyways, my first lens is Remember the Troops. It’s not entirely finished yet, so it looks a bit incomplete, but I’m still finding new stuff to add to it. There are only five days left in the Superhero Project Challenge, so I’m pretty late in getting started on this. I’m going to work hard though and see if I can get all five done by the deadline.
How about you? Are you participating in the Superhero Project too?
Massive SquidTop Revamp
I spent most of my afternoon today working with Captain Squid on SquidTop, which is a cool site where Squidoo lensmasters can make their own free blog about their lenses. Anyways, we completely revamped the site, and I must say it looks pretty awesome. It’s a really big improvement over what we had before I think.
Some stuff that SquidTop now has:
- A completely redesigned, more eye-appealing theme
- Site-wide search of blogs, posts, and comments
- An anti-spam captcha system using reCAPTCHA
- And more cool features on the way, including a friend system…
If you haven’t created a blog at SquidTop yet, you really should. Besides having a rather nice (and growing) community of Lensmasters, SquidTop is also very Google friendly. I blogged about a lens on SquidTop about a week ago and it’s already ranking high in Google, getting good traffic, and will probably very well start earning me some $ pretty soon! It does help a LOT to blog about your lenses, especially on a Google-loved site such as SquidTop.
Getting Around Squidoo Social Bookmarking Site Bans
While browsing the SquidU forums today, I came across a post about Propeller, which is a social bookmarking site created by AOL. Not too long ago, Propeller banned Squidoo for spam reasons, which was due to people promoting their lenses the wrong way and also for getting a flood of Squidoo submissions. A lot of people probably were being honest and professional about it, it’s just that with Squidoo having over 500,000 lenses made, even a fraction of those submitted to sites like Propeller would be overwhelming.
Anyways, The Captain had a brilliant idea. Why not join SquidTop, create your a blog (free) and write up a useful and informative post about your lens and then submit that to social bookmarking sites? That way, you’ll be able to get traffic to your lens and not have to worry about the “anti-Squidoo” people who have been burned by SquidSpammers downvoting or removing your submission. And, since SquidTop blogs are in subdomain format (ie, blog.squidtop.com), the same way Blogger blogs are instead of just the Squidoo.com/lens format, it will appear a bit less overwhelming because people won’t just see the same “squidoo.com” URL over and over.
The key, though, is to be conservative about your submissions–ie, don’t overwhelm the social bookmarking sites. Also, write decent descriptions, not just one-liners, and tag and categorize your submissions properly. I’m not sure if anything is hated more by social bookmarking site users than a submission that’s in the wrong category or is tagged wrong. If you take the extra few seconds to find a proper category, write up a quick (but decent) description, and tag well, your submissions to social bookmarking sites will be enjoyed by all and will stand through the ages like a beacon of hope for your Squidoo lenses.
