Gregoryolney's Lensography

Postcard collecting just seems to have happened to me - it crept up without my realising what was happening. When my dad died I found an old postcard of the "Queen Elizabeth" in his wallet. He and my mum crossed the Atlantic to New York on this ship in 1967, and he had put a mark on it to show where their cabin was. So I thought I would keep it, others got added, and then one day, having nothing better to do, I put them in an old photograph album, and the hobby had started.

Then along came the internet, and having recently retired I decided to scan the old postcards I had as a sort of backup in case the originals were damaged or lost. Next came a website, but just for Stratford-upon-Avon - my home town. But it sort of grew. People liked the website and started to send me scans of their postcards. I went to Postcard Fairs and bought more, so that today there are about 8,800 images on the website Postcards of the Past, which currently has over 500 pages and is becoming almost too big to handle.

I started putting Google Ads on it, at first just for fun, but now these provide a little boost to my pension, only about £35 a month, but every little helps. Then I found Zazzle and made some reproductions of a few of my old postcards. This has grown so that I make around £20 a month from this. Zazzle recommends Squidoo, so here I am, confidently expecting to make a small fortune - not ! I actually joined about 12 months ago, but I haven't had the time until now to do much about it.

Most of my lenses are of old postcards of a random selection of places, with a few about other stuff that interests me, like the fate of the Russian Royal Family for example. I would like to increase the number of lenses considerably, and no doubt will do so slowly - like everything else, time becomes more valuable as you get older and slow down !

But that's more than enough about me - here are my lenses. I've tried to categorise them.

Based on my VERY limited experience of Squidoo, I have already come up with a couple of simple tips (oops, three actually !) which, in my view, should help produce good quality lenses.

(1) Keep you lens to a reasonable length. Too long and your viewers can easily get lost on the page. This is the nature of the internet and the screen - now if we could keep pages short, and then turn over like a book.......but this is for someone else to think about !

(2) Correct Spelling and Grammar - poor spelling and bad grammar will make your site look very unprofessional. One example which keeps cropping up is "your" instead of "you're". Another is "laying" instead of "lying" - chickens "lay" eggs, people "lie" down ! There are thousands more. I just spotted another "Things I should of known before going to....."

(3) Don't be too serious. With one or two exceptions, Squidoo is a bit of fun which you want your readers to enjoy, so keep it light-hearted and don't take yourself too seriously. Remember, everything has its funny side - my dad's best mate was an undertaker, and he used to tell some of the funniest stories that I've ever heard - corpses getting mixed up or lost etc etc !

All for now, I'll add to this as I gain experience.