Squidwatch

It's been a while since I wrote anything about Squidoo. Even though I realized it wasn't for me (codesnipers: Enter the Lensmaster), I've kept maintaining a few lenses, and I'm still impressed by the ease of use.

The reason for this quick update is to let you know that they've added some basic stats, so you can now see visitor numbers, trackbacks and clickthroughs etc. You can also see the lens rating and basic traffic info on the dashboard. These might not be huge leaps forward, but they definitely make the dashboard more useful, and the extra depth is nice to have. The downside is that the dashboard doesn't show the last update date anymore. Also, as I learned from Ian M Jones, they now rank lenses based on a combination of their rating and their 7 day traffic, rather than on all-time traffic as originally used. There's a new affiliate module too, some kind of mega mall, and as with the Amazon module, it's surprisingly easy to add the products to your pages.

Of the lenses I've kept up, (and as I suspected in that codesnipers post), the one about the Nintendo Wifi connection has seen the most traffic. It was one of the easiest to do, and has barely changed since the night I built it. If I was going to do more lenses, I'd aim for similar topics: something with a clear narrow story and some quality focused resources to link to. I've also been maintaining the Micro ISV Digest lens. I've added a link to each of the weekly digest posts; it might be useful as an archive, but don't rely on it for notification new ones, as it's often later in the week when I get around to updating it.

In other squid related news, there's a giant one on display at the National History Museum in London.

And, finally, if that's not mind-blowing enough, try to imagine how this could possibly get 592 diggs and make it to the front page. It's a piece of javascript that automatically opens a link if you hover over it. I'm open to suggestions, but I can't think of a single good (ie. non-evil) reason to do that, and I hope it doesn't take off.

Tag: squidoo