Squidblog

A fine looking chart:

And as usual, the Squidteam is laboring away.

We’re fixing a few bugs that cropped up, including a star rating issue and LensRank not updating (it will in a few hours).

As always, if you’re finding something weird happening on your lens, please document it with as many details (even a screengrab) and send in a bug report. It may be a holiday weekend, but we’ve got an eye on the homestead and looking out for your reports.

Thanks!

P.S. And hey, if you’re looking for something fun to do today….

We’re all in a hurry when we’re surfing the web. We’re looking for something, an answer to a question (”is gorilla hair ground covering toxic to my dog?”) or better yet, meaning. Usually you have to put in a little time to snap right to what you want. Search, poke, back, hunt, look, back again, and on and on. Or if you’re like me you have no fewer than 89 tabs open in Firefox when you’re on a research mission.

In an attempt to help searchers get where they ultimately want to go, a little faster, we’re trying a new series of ‘greetboxes’ on Squidoo. The first series of greetbox experiments will only be visible to searchers (as in, people Googling or Yahooing or Binging). And only if you, the lensmaster, have selected to keep the ‘Discovery Tool‘ on your lens turned on. If so, the searcher will see the greetbox at the top of a lens, spotlighting good lenses related to her search. She can easily dismiss it if she’s already happy with where she’s landed. (The challenge to you is to make the latter part of that sentence true).

Here’s a static example.

So if you haven’t already, try turning the Discovery Tool on and give the searcher greetbox a shot. It’s a good traffic play. Because once your lens is participating, that means other participating lenses will also point back to yours from their greetboxes.

We’ll run a few slightly different versions of these boxes over the next few days to see what works best. Maybe together we can convince some of the searchers who fly by in a hurry to stop and smell some roses.

We love to hear how partner charities are putting donations to good use. Here are a few updates from partner charities who share their newsletters with us:

“Thanks to you Squids for your generosity to many causes, including our own small one to help upgrade combat troops, especially in the troops now fighting in Afghanistan.”
~Operation Helmet

“Your donation will help us provide educational opportunity to millions of children in the developing world. Since 2000, we have published 333 local language children’s titles, established over 7,100 libraries, partnered with local villages to build 765 schools, funded 179 computer and language labs, and provided 7,132 girls with long-term scholarships through secondary school. At Room to Read, we believe that there is no more valuable investment than the gift of education and the life change it can provide.”
~Room to Read

“Caring individuals like you help us continue our relentless efforts to cure leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and myeloma, and improve the quality of life of patients and their families.”
~The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society

Aw…thanks for the warm fuzzies. You can easily make these fuzzies even warmer. Won’t you spend just 5 minutes to make a lens for one of our charity partners?

Do you have an official newsletter for your charity? Add us to the list! Use charitynewsletters at squidoo.com, or send us the sign-up link. We love to know what you’re up to. (Please don’t use payteam at squidoo.com, thanks!)

Hi charities! Time to dust off those bios and avatars of yours and see where you could use an update.

Your avatar and biography are important components of your lens, especially as a charity. The face you present needs to be polished, and a missing image or bio can be devastating to your reputation!

Does your bio look like this? Ick. Chances are slim a reader will donate. Time for an update. The best part is it will only take 5 minutes!

Once you’ve logged into your account, you’ll find all the info you need to update your bio on the My Profile tab of your dashboard. In that top Personal Info section you’ll see Default Photo and Default Bio. Let’s update the bio first. This will update your global biography, meaning it will show on all your lenses. You can also edit the biography on each lens individually, in the workshop.

Writing a biography.
Your biography doesn’t need to be long or extensive. In fact, you probably have the perfect elevator speech for your organization on your own website, or neatly tucked in a mission statement. Here are some of my favorite short biographies from our partner charities:

Paws Animal Kingdom is a Non profit charity dedicated to helping animals all over the world. We are dedicated to building a NO KILL animal sanctuary on 100+ acres of land in the Maryland area. You can help by visiting http://www.pawsanimalkingdom.org and clicking the donate button!
~Paws Animal Kingdom
 

Wildlife Forever is a 22 year old multi-species conservation organization. Our mission is to conserve America’s wildlife heritage through conservation education, preservation of habitat, and management of fish and wildlife. Become a member and support wildlife in America.
~Wildlife Forever
 

The Freeplay Foundation has helped more than 8 million poor and vulnerable people improve the quality of their daily lives through the distribution of sustainable, self-powered and environmentally friendly technologies. We strive to provide the poorest of the poor with access to education, information and energy.
~Freeplay Foundation
 

See how easy it is? From these bios, it’s easy to tell what each charity does and how they do it. If you’re having a hard time writing your bio, ask yourself, “What problem do we solve?” Keep it simple, so anyone can easily understand it.

Go ahead and enter yours, and be sure to click “save.”

Next, upload a photo.
The easiest way to add an image quickly and build brand recognition is to use your logo. The best logos are simple, have few colors, and aren’t intricate. If your logo is a combination of text and graphics, for instance, consider removing the text and using just the graphic. If you don’t have access to a good graphic designer, ask for help on our peer-driven forum. We bet a tech savvy lensmaster would be happy to lend a hand.

Remember to use a small image (2″x2″ on your monitor is good), and .gif or .jpg files are best.

That’s it! Now your bio is beautiful.

Bonus: after you’ve updated your bio, send an email to kimberly at squidoo.com with a link to your official charity Squidoo lens. You’ll get credit for updating your lens!

Welcome to these four new charity partners! Starting immediately, you can create lenses and send your royalties to these hard-working organizations. Soon, you can add the Donations Module to your lens and encourage readers to give even more.

New Identity Magazine
New Identity Magazine is a publication created to help people find their new identity in Christ by presenting interesting topics, issues and ideas from multiple Christian perspectives and showcasing the cultural and world aspects of life and following God.
 

Freeplay Foundation
The Freeplay Foundation has helped more than 8 million poor and vulnerable people improve the quality of their daily lives through the distribution of sustainable, self-powered and environmentally friendly technologies.
 

Global Sports Alliance USA
Global Sports Alliance USA is a nonprofit organization focused on making sporting events more sustainable and encouraging people to adopt a green lifestyle. We promote sustainable living to sports players and fans of any age from all sports backgrounds.
 

Cecil County Pregnancy Center
The Cecil County Pregnancy Center is a Christian, prolife organization which provides emotional support and practical assistance to pregnant women and to families with young children.
 

Visit these and our other partner charities listed at Charity Central.

Congratulations, and welcome!
~Kimberly Dawn Wells
YOUR Charity Organizer on Squidoo

PS - not yet a partner charity? Learn about our criteria and apply here.

A lens, as you know, is a signpost. A page. A scrapbook. A magazine spread. A flyer online. An organized page full of information on a single topic. It can have videos and links and photos and text, as well as social participation from your readers in polls and Duels and TwitterLists and Guestbooks and Caption Contests and the like.

In an effort to help you organize the participation happening on your lens, to help your readers easily access the whole conversation in each module, and to help them in turn spread your lens onward and outward to more people, today we’re releasing a feature we call “Module Pages.”

Module Pages are standalone pages dedicated to only a handful of our most social modules. Each module page spotlights a single module, on its very own page, right “next to” your lens. Think of them like subpages to your lenses. Kind of how you can see a single blog post on a blog, on its own, and then navigate back to the main blog. Back and forth.

In execution, it’s as simple as us adding a “more” link to your active social modules. That more link takes the reader to your standalone module page. So, if you have 409 comments in your Guestbook, but don’t want to show them all on your lens (massively long webpages can take longer to load, and 400 comments can take up some serious real estate!), you can set your Guestbook to show only a few and then your reader will see a link: “See all 409 Comments.” That link takes her to your Module Page for that Guestbook. The reader can then easily scan all the comments at once, as well as tweet or Facebook or email or subscribe to that module. I guess you could call it micro-following.

On social modules where a “more” link doesn’t apply, we’ll run a “Share this module” button that prompts a reader to do the same outward spreading for that module… tweeting, emailing, stumbling, and so on.

Another example: Let’s say you’re using a Links Plexo as a Top 10 List. Now that Top 10 list can live on your lens, like it always has, as well as spotlighted on its very own Module Page. So if a reader loved the list and wanted to share it on Twitter, he can tweet it directly. Which in turn gets people back to your Module Page and your lens.

Last example: If your reader posted a comment in your Star Wars vs. Star Trek duel, he should be able to send that module on to his Facebook friends, instead of making them hunt for it in the middle of your 40 other modules on the lens. If someone clicks through and visits your Duel’s “Module Page” she’ll be able to quickly understand what is happening in that conversation, and can then browse the rest of your lens.

As you can see, the emphasis with this new feature is on spreading modules as souvenirs of your reader’s experience on your lens.

Extra considerations (and bonuses):

• Module Pages will have very clear navigation to take the reader back to the lens, and even better, to help them dig in to other parts of your lens.
• Module Pages will be wrapped in lots of good social triggers, so your readers will be prompted to share your module with other people (which brings new people back to your Module Page and to your lens).
• We’re running ads on Module Pages, which increases the ad pool, and increases your revenue.
• We have built in SEO considerations for this, so Google won’t hang up on duplicate content.
• Soon we’ll be working to widgetize your Module Pages, so that you (and your readers if you want) will be able to “grab” the module and post a widget for it on your blog or site or email.

We currently have an awesome selection of partner charities who are working hard to share their stories and raise funds through Squidoo. Some of these charities met us through passionate lensmasters, and some ran into us in a search engine. We’re curious, “how did you find us?”

If you’d like to get a little extra special promo, or just want to cure our curiosity, send a short note to charity -at- squidoo.com and tell us how you first learned about Squidoo.

While you’re at it, why not send a short note to your volunteers? If they create a lens or two, you could end up earning mega donations.

Congratulations to the graduates of our first ever Giant Squid Summer School!

They worked their tails off for 8 weeks, each making 1 new lens a week in answer to creative writing challenges we threw out. More important, our Giants were able to meet each other in their own private forum, swap ideas, cheer each other on–and teach us a few things along the way, too!

We had a lot of fun seeing the clever stuff they produced. See who our 47 graduates are, and check out a few of their Summer School lenses!

P.S. Your Giant Squid Organizers will be running a neat Back to School project starting September 4th. It promises to be easy enough to participate in with just an hour a week, and challenging enough to make it worth your while! Stay tuned, Giants.

And thanks.

As you probably know, Twitter has been experiencing major site outages, which affects everyone who connects to or uses the service. This means you might not be able to add your Twitter account information to your social settings, or tweet notifications from newly published lenses.

The good news is you haven’t done anything wrong, your account is likely fine, and it isn’t broken! As soon as Twitter is back up and running, everything should work smoothly again.

You can keep track of Twitter’s updates on their blog: Status.Twitter.com

In the meantime, share the love by promoting another lensmaster’s lens.