Squidoo

My Codesnipers post this week is all about Squidoo.

Read: Squidoo: Enter the Lensmaster

I was having a little trouble getting it, but I eventually decided that it is a good thing, because it makes it extremely to build, publish and maybe even make money from web pages on any particular topic. It basically enables experts to share knowledge more easily.

I haven't really decided what to do with it myself. I tried creating a few lenses, and I've been rolling a few ideas around, mostly for tutorials, overviews or resources for my products. But do I really have time to maintain more web pages?

While I'm talking about Squidoo, I hit a problem with my flood lens at the weekend, I wanted to edit it, but whenever I switched to Edit mode, all but one of my modules disappeared. It was confusing, everything else was there in the published version for anyone to view, but when I tried to edit it, it was gone. I just figured out how to fix it this morning. Somehow, an empty draft version of my lens had been created, so whenever I went to edit, I was seeing the draft version. If you click on Discard Draft, it reverts to the published version.

I wish I'd known that before, because I'm convinced that something similar happened when I was building another lens, in that case I ended up starting from scratch.

And while I'm mentioning Codesnipers, KC has just introduced a new feature, the Anonymous blog. If you've got something you want to get off your chest, or want to ask a question of the community, it might be what you're looking for. Only Rants or Open Questions are allowed, and submissions are moderated prior to posting. Vent away.

Update: The Squidoo draft thing happened to me again on another lens, I don't think I've even used the drafts feature more than once. Anyway... Squidoo's Discard this Draft button is looking like an important tool.

Update 2: Clearly the whole democratic Lensrank thing isn't quite working as well as it should just yet... this lens is ranked #1 of all the 6,000+ lenses at the time of writing, despite having absolutely no content (unless they're trying to make a point that the more you add to a lens the worse it gets, and that therefore, an empty lens is a happy lens :)). Ah, the joys of beta testing.