Squidoo Springs Into the Green

Just in time for Easter and St. Patrick's Day (not necessarily in that order - actually in just the opposite order) Squidoo has unwrapped a new cover for Celebrate magazine - and this time it's in the green!

For all of our St. Patrick's Day and Easter gift guide-categorized lenses, you'll now see those with a fresh and pretty green background (the picture here shows just a hint).

If you want your spring holiday-seasoned lenses to appear in Celebrate, just re-categorize them in a Gift Guide category for either of those two holidays and your lens will end up looking a whole lot like this one.  (Unless you opt out, which you can do in your lens workshop.)

Bet I can find a few more of my lenses that would fit into those categories.  How about you?  Feel free to drop a link in our comments section below!

Exploiting Shirley

I have a couple of Shirley Temple lenses on Squidoo so when I read late last week that 84-year-old Shirley Temple had just joined Twitter, I was thrilled!  I started following the account immediately.  Her posts so far were adorable and I was excited to be able to include them on a Twitter Follow module on one of my lenses.

Then, over the weekend, I (thankfully) happened to read that Twitter was duped.  Shirley Temple Black's spokesperson said she is not on Twitter.  I checked the account and, indeed, while the URL was the same and included Shirley's name, the identification and information on the account now belonged to a scumbag marketing company that shall remain nameless.

The great news is that today the Twitter account no longer exists.  But I'm still fuming, just a little, that someone would exploit a public figure the way they did.  I should have been suspicious (and I was, a little) that Shirley hadn't included her married name in the account.  She's gone by that name for many, many years and the "Shirley Temple" did have a slight exploitative ring to it.  The other good news is that the Twitter Follow module on the lens where I added it didn't work, and didn't display, so I wasn't responsible for leading any of its 10,000 or so followers to that bogus account.

As far as I'm concerned, Shirley Temple Black is a national treasure and I sincerely hope that the person who used her name will be caught and punished, but I can't imagine that will really happen. I'll just be even more cautious than usual in the future and not assume that just because a Twitter account says "verified," that makes it so.

Rant over.

Wow! It's Wednesday!

Just realized that it's Wednesday, halfway through the week already.  Wow, time flies when I'm having fun!

It's also the 16th of January, already halfway through the first month of the new year.  I started the year feeling very "up" and ambitious, ready to set goals and meet them head-on.  So, I just pulled up the notepad file I made titled "goal notes" to see how I'm doing.  (To be honest, I was a little bit afraid to look.)

Not bad, really.  A few extra-strong points and one or two weak ones, but overall not looking bad for 50 percent of the way through the month and 4 percent through the year.  I see how I need to adjust my focus and I'll be working on that.  Definitely see that if I'm going to finish them, I need to spend more time dispersing those lenses that have fallen so low in lensrank.  (Yep, one of those weak points.)

It really does pay to assess goals periodically.  Have you looked at yours lately?  How are you doing?

Squidoo is In the Pink!

Welcome to Valentine's Day on Squidoo!  Yep, no time like the first week of January to get started on those Valentine's lenses!  (Here's one of mine.)

Have Valentine pages to update?  When you do, consider adding them to the Gift Guide category and choosing a Valentine's Day topic.  That choice will give you the gorgeous pink and red Celebrate theme, just released for Valentine's Day.  I love seeing Squidoo in the pink!

Unsure about joining Celebrate magazine?  Would 3.7 million pageviews over Christmas sway you?  It's up to you, but there are advantages to including your lenses in the magazine.  When you do, make sure you've updated each Valentine's lens with a great, square intro photo as well as a nice, big picture in the body of the lens to give it a better chance of being featured on Celebrate's front page.

What's your favorite Valentine's Day lens?  Feel free to share it in a comment below or on Susan52 on Squidoo's Facebook page. 

XOXOXO, everyone!

Resolved: Become a Better Writer

Happy New Year!  Wow, seems like only yesterday we wondered if the power would still be on when we crossed over into the year 2000.  Now, going into 2013, all we have to worry about is falling off a fiscal cliff.  But that's a topic for another day (and another blog).

Did you read the Hello January post on SquidooHQ today?  In it I mentioned seven things to do this month and to keep in mind throughout the new year.  One of those things has to do with working outside your comfort zone in order to become a better writer.  A day or two after I wrote that, I happened upon this from the Writer's Don't Cry section of Amazon's Omnivoracious blog.   The article includes 10 resolutions for writers, things you can do this year to hone your craft. Idea number five, to exercise your writing, expands more on the practice of writing outside your comfort zone.  Looks like I was onto something with my similar suggestion!

If you're a writer (and if you're a lensmaster, you are a writer) and want to improve your writing skills, give that article a read.  The "comfort zone" topic really resonated with me and I'd love to know which of the 10 tips speak to you.  Would you let me know in a comment below?

Here's wishing each of us a happy, healthy, and productive 2013.  May each of our lenses be better written and more successful than the ones that came before!