The Lensmaster Dashboard 2.0!

If you've installed Magicality's lensmaster-created Dashboard Extension, heads up!

As I told him well in advance of this launch, our improvements to the dashboard will bust his DE firefox extension for anyone who has it installed on Squidoo. :(

So if you have it installed, please uninstall it so that your dash doesn't go ape.

The good news is that I'm sure there will be lots of new ideas for another lensmaster-run dashboard extension, and that Magicality (and anyone else) is always invited to make new ones! Just be forewarned that sometimes, unofficial extensions get broken when we release new stuff.

First, some interesting stats:

* The lensmaster dashboard receives 4.3% of page views on the entire site.
* It's the most viewed page by lensmasters.
* At the moment the Dashboard is just an index of lenses, an A-to-Z, a laundry list.
* There is enormous potential here to help lensmasters make more, better, more easily watchable and editable lenses. And, more importantly, to get out of your way and give you more controls.

So, imagine you're a lensmaster returning to Squidoo. (Hey, look, you are). You're probably coming back to see how your lenses are doing (are they getting traffic? comments? do people like them? have I made a sale?). Or you're ready to make a new one.

We know who you are. We know what kinds of lenses you've made. We know how they're performing.

Introducing the Daily Digest page.

The dashboard isn't just a content management system, it's not just an index of lenses. It's also the front page of your personal Squidoo newspaper. It's a place for you to see headlines, movers&shakers, info about YOUR lenses.

It's also a place to check in on your lenses and watch what's happening with them--which are working? which need TLC? which are in trouble? which are really popular right now? What do you need to take action on. That's what the dashboard needs to tell you. That's what the new Daily Digest page does.

There will be five versions of this Daily Digest Dashboard page, depending on the number of lenses the lensmaster has. There's a version for lensmasters with 1 lens only, a version for 2 lenses only, a version for 3-9 lenses, a version for 10+ lenses, and a version for Giant Squids. The 10+ version give you a lot of new tools for managing your roster of lenses. Even if you have 400 lenses, you should find this new dashboard easy to navigate and organize.

Introducing the Lens Labels.

For starters, we wanted to make it easy for you to sort your lenses by a bunch of different criteria. Top earners. Big traffic. Needs to be updated. Lots of comments in Guestbooks. WIP or locked lenses. And so on.

So we created a Pick Your view section, where you can look at a dashboard of just the lenses you want to see.

But it gets better. Way better.

You know how you can stick mail in folders, and how Gmail has a way to organize messages by label or tag? Now your dashboard has a way to add custom, personal labels to your lenses.

For example, do you have a lot of lenses about dog breeding, and then a bunch of others about movies? Make a label for each topic, assign the relevant lenses to it, so you can easily organize lenses by whatever category you want. What about a To-Do list label? Maybe you want to flag a bunch of lenses that you keep meaning to work on, or add that cool new Duel module to, or email out to friends. Make a To-Do label, assign lenses you want to work on, and go. The opportunities are pretty much endless. Finally, you can manage hundreds of custom, personalized micro-dashboards all at once.

And, because it's always fun to see your whole list of lenses at once and sort within there, we've kept the All Lenses list front and center for you.

Coming Soon: The Comm Center

We know, you get a lot of email from your lenses. Lots of Squidcasts. Lots of comments. And you send out even more. Wouldn't it be great to have a communications center on Squidoo, a place where you can see all your comments, duel comments, messages, updates, Squidcasts, etc all at once? Where you can decide to get a digest update of all your messages daily, weekly, or as they occur? Yeah. We thought so. Stay tuned, that's up next.

Here's a preview of some static pages from our staging server. Please note that these are just big images and as such will take a while to load in your browser. The live site will be nice and zippy.

1. Here's a look at the Daily Digest page for someone with lots of lenses.

Notes to correspond to the pink numbers...
1. This is the new Lens Labels section. Looks are deceiving...this simple little section packs a serious punch. You can see that I've created my own lists to organize lenses in -- a weekly to do list, a MonkeyBrain list, a My Restaurant Lenses list, etc.
2. Everyone with 3 or more lenses will get this Lens Lists section of filters we've automatically set up for you: Big Earners, Big Traffic, Most Commented, etc. When you click on each you'll see a description of what the lists mean, and which lenses fall under them.
3. Every time you come to your dash, we'll show you, at random, one of your lowest LensRank lenses here. Just so you know what you might want to work on!

2. This is what your Lens Lists look like. For example, this is a list I set up to organize for my HeyMonkeyBrain lenses.

3. This is the screen you get when you want to Apply lenses to a particular label. So if you want to set up a My Tattoo Lenses list, just create a label, then pick it from the dropdown here and check off the lenses you want to add to it. Voila!

I know a lot of you want a way to edit a bunch of lenses at once, or make global changes to your lens bios or tags and such. That was the #2 most wished for thing on your list above (at least for a while). There's a LOT of technical work that needs to go into that, and a few ways that people could really abuse it (not YOU, of course) so we haven't developed this yet. Not saying we couldn't or won't -- I just wanted to acknowledge that you asked for it, and explain why it's not in this release.

Unlike the lens redesign process, the lensmaster dashboard is not something we need to keep tweaking and testing and evolving over time.

We haven't made any major updates to the dashboard in 2 years, and it's high time! So we're going to do it in one big overhaul, and give you plenty of heads-up time so that you're not too disoriented by the new dash.

From there we'll make little improvements based on your feedback and every now and then as new features arise, but it won't be an ongoing, volatile process. So breathe a sigh of relief, pour yourself a cup of coffee, work on some lenses and keep an eye out for Dashboard announcements in the SquidU forums.

Thanks to Loyalis's wishlist page, and Magicality's Firefox Extension, we've already looked at a bunch of your dashboard requests and are working many of them in.

Thanks guys. You two are rockstars.