Lens Workshop Addon for Firefox

Whenever you publish a lens, an extra link is added to the box at the top of page: "Ping lens". This will notify a variety of search engines and blog aggregation services that your lens has been updated. The best time to click on this is just after publishing a lens for the first time, or after doing some major rewriting of it. If you've only made a really small change to the lens, then it's probably not worth doing a ping.

Two new boxes are added to the sidebar on the right of the workshop.

The first is titled "Extra Widgets and Modules", and it will open up when clicked on. This box has a collection of modules that you can add to your lens. Clicking on any of the bold links will take you to a page that prompts for which lens you want to add it to. To read more about these modules and how they work, click on the 'More info' links.

The second box is titles "SquidUtils.com", and it is opened by default. This box contains links to some of the tools on SquidUtils, and will open in a new tab or window.

At the top of every module there two extra links: [#link] and [Top]. 'Top' takes you to the top of the workshop, while '#link' to that module when it is published, so that you can provide a link to it from elsewhere on your lens. Simply right-click on the #link, and select 'Copy Link Location' from the menu.

When you view the stats for one of your lenses, you'll see some extra links a features:

- just below the lens title, there's a new 'Edit' link that goes directly to the workshop.
- the graphs have an option to show just the last 7 days (Firefox v3 only).
- the average Lensrank is calculated for this month, and the previous 2 months
- below the graphs is a table showing the actual traffic and Lensrank

The 'My Groups' tab has a number of tweaks to make it easy to manage them all.

Firstly, all of the groups are compressed to take up less space. Click on a group name to expand it, and see which of your lenses are members of it. The [View] link will open the group's HQ page in a new tab or window.

There is also a box in the top-right corner that filters the list of groups for you. Here's how it works:

- type a keyword in to the box, and press Go
- each group that contains a matching lens will be opened
- all of the other group boxes will be closed

In the example shown above, all groups that contain a lens with 'wedding' in the name are opened, and all others remain closed. This makes it easy to see which other lenses need to be submitted to groups that might have been missed. (Note that it matches against the lens URL not the title).

If you are a Groupmaster, then looking after your groups is made much easier.

The Group Administration page has extra links to view the HQ page, send out a Squidcast, see traffic statistics and the RSS feed.

There are additional links when viewing and editing the HQ page to aid navigation between the various modes.