Musings of a Baby Green Squid

Well, I have a website and I wanted to promote it a bit. I heard Squidoo is a good place to do that. So I came here.

After four days I don't even have time to properly feed and take care of my website. (I must remember to do that, of course.) It's like I came to visit Polynesia and now I want to move into it with my family now: how do I change my nationality? I want my squizenship papers and fast! Where do I sign? Here, and here, and here, er ... thank you.

I now have a "squidoo" folder on my Powerbook G4, and a file called "squidoo snippets.txt" in it to jot down my ideas. I have a Flickr set where I dump my images for my lenses. I have a Firefox bookmark folder called "squidoo". And I also put Squidoo on my speed-dial, just to be sure. (I'm not kidding; you can actually do that if you use the Opera browser.)

Last few days I have been waking up around two a.m. or three a.m. in the night and have been busy polishing my lenses till five o'clock. Then I go to sleep, get up at 6.30 and get ready to go to office, groggy and a bit confused why I am doing this.

I have missed my breakfast, hurried my lunch and nearly missed dinner again. Missed my gym too. Sometimes I go to sleep at two a.m. and get up at three a.m. At the office I haven't spoken to my colleagues for a while.

Today is Saturday, and I did the same or similar routine, except there is no office today. It's 8.58 a.m. now and I am writing this with sleep in my eyes.

What got me hooked this bad?

Yes, hook, line and sinker (that's also the abbreviated name of a trilogy by Len Deighton, by the way) I fell for Squidoo.

First I wrote a lens to promote my site. I was uneasy. Didn't know what a WIP-thing was when it came up on my screen. It finally got through and somebody generously gave me 5 stars and I climbed the ranks slowly.

Reading and poking around - I read Seth Godin's UUU eBook - I slowly realized that people write here about what they do best and share so that when other people land here they have the best webpage they could have found anywhere. That's what it's about here and that's what I should be doing, rather than "promoting" my site. Yes, it's also about promoting yourself and your site (I have read somewhere), but I think the most value-add we can do is by writing about what we enjoy doing the most. Well, that's what I think now after a few days here anyway.

I am an amateur photographer. I have tons of photographs on my hard drive. And I had done a set or two on butterfly macro photography this year and enjoyed doing that so much (along with some tulip photography two months later). Why not do a lens on the subject? So in the morning I got up and did a write-up, assembling modules, rearranging them. I had the butterfly macros on my Flickr account. So I learned how to use Flickr photos in Text/Write module. I learned about the StickyNote and The Most Important Thing modules. OK. Thus my Learning Macro Photography with Butterflies as Subjects lens slowly took shape.

Nothing happened for a while. I went to the Angel's forum and asked them what I was doing wrong. This was the best lens I had created, put all my time and effort into it, and nothing was happening. I joined a few fan clubs. I read some and favorited them. Then I saw that my lens got the green signal. Thanks visitors, thanks Angels! After about two days I then noticed something else: when I searched for "macro photography" my lens was the second link at the top! Hey, not bad! I said to myself.

So I read a little bit more about how to get higher in the rank (learn to use tags for instance), I read about the Purple Squids and Giant Squids. I am reading the forums.

Hey, guess what? It's 12.39 p.m. and as I was writing this and juggling the cooking in the kitchen I saw two Giant Squids float by who gave me their blessings with 5 stars. And how does that feel? I said 'W00t', like an owl because I don't know how squids show excitement. Thank you so much Giant Squids!!

I feel welcome here. I can make a good lens. I am hooked!

In the beginning I did some of the things blindly, without understanding (yeah! 'in the beginning' means two days ago in Squidoo land).

A newcomer must read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe of Squidoo Lens Creation! and Just the Faq page. There's a mine of essential information in there.

I am obsessed about backing up my data. So one of the first things I did was to check how to back up my lenses.

Listen to Giant Squids. They are like your mom: they may nag you a bit with their advice of do this and don't do that (squido and squidonts), but eventually they want you to succeed.

I have learned that /lensmaster folder is different than /lensmasters folder.

I told you I even read the three U's (UUU) of Seth Godin (did you know that 'Seth Godin' anagrams to 'The doings.' ? By the way, in my sleep-induced state I was searching for palindrome generator, rather than an anagram generator.)

And I have come up with my own three R's: 1. Read lenses (other than your own), 2. Rate them, 3. Rebuild your lenses often. Now you have 3xU and 3xR and this is what I call "UR Squidoo".

Don't push that PUBLISH button the first time in a hurry. Take your time. If you publish a sloppy article people will lose faith in you (even your fans, if you have any that is!).

NOTE: As will be clear later (please read on!), I was wrong about this. Apparently, even if you don't explicitly publish it, the algorithm does it for for you and it's embarrassing to see your skeleton page go online all of a sudden.

If you have a lens and your heart is really not in it, remove it. Copy the contents into a notepad somewhere.

Be consistent in the use of modules. Don't be too flashy. Don't be gimmicky. Use white space liberally.

Don't take 100% cash. Leave something for charity. Greediness begets only greediness.

You can constantly polish your lenses. And improve them. After a few days of publishing the Learning Macro Photography with Butterflies as Subjects lens, I realized that if I could post also the properties of pictures (such as exposure, aperture, ISO, etc.) along with the name of the butterflies, it would be so much better. So I did.

Remember: 'UUU' = Unique, Useful, Updated. And it's not 'You, You, You!'

Don't put so many ads in your lens that it looks like NASCAR racing. Put relevant ads and put them sparingly. Oh God! I am beginning to sound like a nagging mother too!

Most helpful lenses for newbies I found were the following:

• The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe of Squidoo Lens Creation!



• 50 Awesome Squidoo How-To Lenses From A-Z


• Avoiding the Squidoo Pitfalls


• Squidoo Marketing Strategies: Help To Develop and Market Your Squidoo Lenses

You can learn a lot by reading, searching, posting in the forums of the SquidU University. The AnswerDeck is awesome.

I found out there is a also site called squidutils.com. Okay, I log in and it has something called Advanced Lensmaster Dashboard and it gives me group statistics. Hmm.

I can check backlinks. Then I found out there is something really cool here. It's called the Lens Health Check. I head to it and point to my macro photography lens and click Check. Immediately it gives me very very useful information.

For Primary Tag: "macro photography" field it says:

Critical - Your Primary Tag is missing from the Tag List! Always make sure you add the Primary Tag to the list of other tags, or your lens will not appear on the tag page.

So I head back to my lens and add the primary tag to the rest of it (I had thought the primary tag would be naturally included in the list of other tags).

Then at the bottom there is a Squidaholic link which says I can get some reports. I click on it. Not much traffic for this lens: Total Traffic: 8 visits this week. Okay. I click on Lensrank.

And wow!!!

I had noted just a few minutes earlier that my rank was around #20,000s; and after seconds of tweaking the tags as suggested by squidutils.com the lens rank jumps from #20,802 to #12,605. Just one tweak; and a few seconds !!

This is what it shows me now:
09/10/2008: #685,204
09/11/2008: #85,310
09/12/2008: #20,802
09/13/2008: #12,605

Now I search for "macro photography" and am surprised to find that although my lensrank has gone way up, I am now third on the list. Wasn't I second on the list before the tag tweak? I may have been mistaken there. Maybe I was on third from top before also? I am puzzled. I must have been mistaken earlier. Well, third place, not bad. I need to polish it a bit more, maybe?

Way to learn !! So there is tons of things to learn here.

Time to take a rest. 3.39 p.m.

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Here I go again.

There is one page I wish to avoid on Squidoo. I hope I will never land up on The Best Lenses on Squidoo that Never Made It page. But don't avoid reading it !!!

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PANIC!
Around 5.30 p.m. or so I saw that two of my incomplete lenses went online by themselves. I had never published them as far as I can remember. They just got the green tick mark and went online by themselves. I panicked. I headed to the University forums and searched the threads for how I could "unpublish" them. I found the answer in a thread: it is not possible!! You have to delete your lens!! Okay. So I copied what I could into text editor and deleted them. I will get to it some day.

Meanwhile, if I am not 100% ready I will not build a lens. I may use a text editor first and assemble the pieces when I am ready. That is what I learned today.

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Here are some of the things I am wondering about:
1. What is the point of favoriting your own lens? And rating your own lens?
2. Shouldn't there be a utility to backup your lenses in XML every night and save it on your local PC?
3. Why is the Delete button so close to the Edit button?

There is much more to explore. Way to go. CBE and CDE, as Bernard Woolley would have said to the minister ("can't be everywhere" and "can't do everything"). So, I'll stop here.

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UPDATE:
Sep 14, 2008, 4.59 p.m.

My search for "macro photography" shows my article at top now with a rank #5,193. Okay. I know I can slip into obscurity if somebody new comes along and does a pretty good job on this topic, and I will welcome the newcomer. Competition is good for community. It motivates us. That's what it's about: to create the best content possible, and maintain it. The market will see best content creators thrive: just as Seth Godin says. (Or was it Adam Smith now?)

Anyway, keep polishing your lenses. But I dread what will happen if I have 99 lenses or 299 lenses. taking care of five lenses is one thing, taking care of hundreds is another matter. Giants are giants for a reason: they are smart, motivated and devote a lot of their time and energy into it.

I am beginning to understand how much work it involves to keep a lens fresh.

Nothing comes for free. And there are no shortcuts. Alas.

Well, I could continue this diary much longer, but I feel that there is no need. I just wanted to communicate what I am feeling, and I think you have an idea now.

If you are a newbie like myself, hope this will encourage you a bit. Did you know that a newbie and a noob or n00b are different? I looked it up in urbandictionary. We are newbies, not noobs. Okay.

If you are a long term inhabitant or a Giant Squid, I hope my ramblings reminded you of your early days. A purple squid must have been a baby green squid in the kindergarten once! Ah, your fond memories of childhood and playing with those octopus babies in the Octopus's Garden in the Shade !!

Thank you for reading this long-winded lens. I appreciate your time. Please kindly leave your feedback and comments below.

Also check out my other lenses including Learning Macro Photography with Butterflies as Subjects and Reader's Digest Version of Baby Green Squid's Findings.

I would like to ask older, experienced community members: how was your first lens made? Do you remember your confusions? Frustrations? Have you shared this experience on a lens somewhere? If so, please let me know and leave a comment below. Thanks !!

Now I need to check up on my email, Reddit and Digg. I vaguely remember I used to do that before.

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