Cleaner Life

My King Crimson obsession continues with the publication of The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp, based on the band that would become King Crimson. Continuing with the King Crimson theme, I made three video showcases: In The Court Of The Crimson King Video Showcase, In The Wake Of Poseidon - King Crimson Video Showcase and Lizard - King Crimson Video Showcase.

Finishing off this week is a lens on singer, songwriter, bass guitarist and guitarist John Wetton. Wetton has worked with many different groups in his career, he is currently with the reunited super group, Asia, which he founded in 1981, before that he co-founded the band U.K. with drummer Bill Bruford when they failed to convince Robert Fripp to reform King Crimson. All three had been members of KC before Fripp disbanded the group in 1974.

I’m up to 27 lenses published lenses with 4 still in WIP. The Wetton lens ended up being much larger than anticipated, I think I have more modules in it than any other I’ve built so far. I may be putting aside music related lens building for a bit, I have a bunch of ideas for non-music related lenses, and plan of working on them for the upcoming week.

I had wanted to publish more, I even held off posting in this blog because I had only published my 18th Lens, Robert Fripp - The Man Behind King Crimson by Sunday, but last night I was able to publish four more, they are kind of a team:

• Hotel Pillows
  
• Hotel Comforters And Feather Beds
• Hotel Bedding Sets | Bedding Featured in Many Hilton® Hotels
• Hotel Bedding Sets | Bedding Featured in Many Marriott® and Ritz-Carlton® Hotels

The Robert Fripp Lens was started when I originally built my Lens on King Crimson. I seems like it took long enough, but I finally managed to get back to it, and finish it! Unfortunately, while putting the final touches on it, I discovered that almost every video I was linked to on the King Crimson Lens was no longer on YouTube, so I spent a good part of my Saturday replacing them. That’s part of what delayed my Lens building over the weekend.

Another thing that delayed me last week was an order that came into my store from a foriegn country. I don’t know if anyone else has these problems with their stores, but the order came from a country that doesn’t have coverage by PayPal yet. The card failed AVS, but may have been a good card. PayPal handles my checkout, and they will process a valid card from any country, but if it fails AVS, and I approve the order, I am unprotected if the card turns out to be stolen.

I spent too much time Thursday night/Friday morning researching my options, because I really didn’t like the idea of turning away a sale, if it is legit, but I really can’t aford to take a chance on the order turning out to be fraudulent. In the end I contacted the customer telling them that they needed to confirm their address with PayPal. This was actually turning them away, since they can’t confirm it because of the country they are in.

After that, I made sure that my checkout won’t allow orders from counties that do not have PayPal yet.

Finally, did I mention I’ve been hanging out at the Squidoo Chat Room? Learning first hand about Loyalis and his strageties is very inspiring, if you haven’t read it yet, this post is a good taste of what I’ve been hearing: The Single Biggest Tip I Can Give Squidoo Lensmasters. It’s also great talking to the other Squids that hang out there, and I’m only there a few hours each night. I have no idea what I’m missing when I’m not there!

So, 22 Lenses publish, 4 WIP’s, and a ton of ideas for the future! 

I’ve changed the theme of this blog, the old one was beautiful, but did not work very well.

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve also replaced my Avatar, not just here, but on every forum/social media site I belong to. If you still see one of my old Avatars around, then it’s some place I don’t visit often, and I’ll change it the next time I log in there.

So here’s the old image of this tree found in the woods behind my house, I’ve been using it, or variations of it as my Avatar for a while now.

With tips I got from GIMP Tutorial Series Guide - Free Coloring Pages and How To Make - Mosaic - Filmstrip Feature and Cutting Image Backgrounds for better eBay Pictures | Gimp I was able to take this version:

Which is the same tree from a different angle, and merged it with a shot of my real face to get this:

My inspiration while doing this was the album cover for Styx’s seventh album, “The Grand Illusion“:

I had it on vinyl!

(so if you think your life is complete confusion

’cause your neighbor’s got it made

just remember that it’s a grand illusion

and deep inside we’re all the same)

In other news, I’ve manged to publish three new Lenses this week. Rock N’ Roll Holidays | Celebrate The Holidays With Rock Music is my first holiday themed Lens. Here I thought I was getting a head start on the coming holidays, but after publishing I found that these two directories were already off to a running start for the Holiday season: Christmas Directory of Lenses and Squidoo Home for The Holidays. I added my Lens to both!

Also, I was amazed that this Lens came out of WIP within an hour of being published! I published it, then went to eat, and when I came back I was suprised to find it out of WIP already. I spent the next three hours working on a problem I found in the way I was using the new Amazon MP3 modules (if you come across a problem working with them, drop me a line, maybe I can help - you can find me on twitter: as CleanerLife).

The next one was an experiment with MagicBuilder, or maybe you can tell from the title: Testing MagicBuilder! Special thanks to Rock_The_Ice for feedback on this and the Rock N’ Roll Holidays Lens. Also thanks to a_willow for encouraging me to keep the experiment. She said I should make it into a tutorial, but I decided to turn it into a review instead.

The third Lens is my first attempt at a food & cooking Lens, Ants On A Log | Heathy Snacks For Kids Of All Ages, which was pretty simple and fun to do. Believe it or not, I was making Ants On a Log as a snack for myself, when I decided to make a Lens about it!

And I had a short celebration on Friday because two of my Lenses reached the 1st tier at the same time. The celebrating sort of died down when the lensrank update came through on Saturday because while The Love Of Dragons: Dragons In Books And On Video continued to rise in rank, DIY Auto Backup Camera: How To Install A Backup Camera On Your Car, Truck, SUV, Or RV dropped back to the 2nd tier. Still that’s pretty good since the How To Install a Backup Camera Lens is just over 2 weeks old, and it’s had 66 hits from Google, now it is starting to get hits from MSN, too. I still haven’t been actively trying to build backlinks for it, either.

17 Lenses published, 4 in progress — I should try to have them, and like 31 - 34 more done by the December deadline for becoming a Giant Squid, think I can do it?

This week has been wild, and the first thing is the page I published on 10/09/08, DIY Auto Backup Camera: How To Install A Backup Camera On Your Car, Truck, SUV, Or RV, which I announced in my last post, received almost 20 visits from Google in it’s first week (over 20 by now). I didn’t even realize this was happening at first, I just figured a bunch of my fans from Squidoo were visiting.

I began to realize something was different about this Lens when I noticed it was slowly rising in lensrank over my older, more established Lenses. My Tips And Ideas For Designing A Successful Website Lens has been my highest ranked Lens almost since I first published it, but it was over taken by The Love Of Dragons: Dragons In Books And On Video because of the increased traffic from entering the Squid’s Choice Awards, but my new DIY Lens was my 2nd highest ranked Lens only a week after being published.

All this, and at that point just 1 rating, 1 comment and one favorite (thanks mulberry). This seems related, Captain Squid’s latest blog post is Why Squidoo Ratings Swaps don’t work, check it out if you haven’t already.

Looking at the statics, I found all the Google traffic listed, and there 10 clickouts. This was incredible, since I had done my regular promotion: I posted here and on 8 other blogs. I posted to Lensroll, Squidom and SquidPoint (first time I did all three on the same day), but didn’t add to Delicious and Digg until a week after I published (well after all the Google traffic).

One thing I know I did try to do was use “backup camera” or “wireless backup camera” in the tile of 8 modules, I also used those words as often as possible in the text and pictures (as you may or may not realize, the picture file names aren’t the same as the description the reader sees, Google sees the picture file name,  and counts it towards how often words or phrases are used on a page, or so I’ve been told).

I’ll be watching this Lens and will still try to make backlinks with social bookmarking sites like I usually do, but I sure hope I can duplicate this in the future.

I’ve been hanging out over at Captain Squid’s Squidoo Chat Room, and was able to hear an interview with Loyalis (he’s Captain Squid, in case you didn’t know), about his history on Squidoo, and It fired my up to start adding more Lenses to my own collection. So, my three newest Lenses are VR3 Bluetooth Hands Free Cell Phone Adapters, VR3 Backup Cameras and Car Safety Products, and VR3 High Quality Audio, Video & High Tech Navigation For Your Car, Truck, RV or SUV.

Never did three in one week before!

First up, Thanks Spirituality for featuring me in her “thank you lensmaster” blog. It was unexpected, and I’m truly honored.

Now, wireless backup cameras… Yes, I’m selling these in my new store, and my big brainstorm several weeks back was to document installing one of these on my car, so I could make a Lens about installing them.

I installed the camera and tested it for two reasons, documenting the install was the second reason, the first was so I could see if I liked the product enough to promote it. I’ve had the camera for almost a year, but originally I had bought it to install on the service truck I was assigned at the company I used to work at. I was unable to install it on that truck, but held on to it because I wasn’t sure what to do with it.

When I was selling stuff on eBay to raise my feedback level, I almost sold it dirt cheap just to get some good feedback, but then decided to try to become a distributor. It took several months to set this up, and when the deal was finally coming together, I realized that I was in love with idea of the product, but really had no idea if I really like the product itself having never actually used it.

So, it was a good thing I didn’t sell it. I’ve been testing it for weeks, I really like it, and I think this Lens is a good way to promote it.

Hopefully the Lensmaking will continue, I’ve come up with a lot of ideas over the past few weeks and really would like some more Lenses in my Squidoo profile! 

Delays, delays, more delays!

I finally started on something outside of Squidoo that I had actually first looked into before I joined Squidoo. Originally I was looking for product to sell on eBay, but things weren’t going very well. If you’ve tried to find a good dropshipper, or wholesale supplier to be able to sell product on sites like eBay, you’ve probably had similar problems.

The best suppliers are very discriminating, the ones that are easy to sign up with tend to have their product already flooded on eBay. Watch out for any dropshippers who charge you a monthly fee — if they charge you a little extra per order, that’s fine in my book because they are doing the shipping for you, but if they are going to charge you a fee each month, something tells me that they don’t expect you to sell much.

Anyhow, I had one of these VR3 backup cameras, so I already liked the company, but when I contacted them, they were already had sellers on eBay, and weren’t about to set up more people selling there. My contact did tell me he’d supply me if I opened a web store some place else, like on Yahoo.

At the time, I wasn’t interested in doing anything other than selling on eBay. I then lost the fire for eBay some time before joining Squidoo.

Months passed, and when my contact called me again, I decided I would take the chance, and start a web store on Yahoo. It turns out they have more than just backup cameras, they have car stereos and GPS systems. I haven’t listed everything I could, I’ll be adding more things as time goes on, it turns out Yahoo’s Merchant Starter has a bigger learning curve than Squidoo, but I think I did pretty well. I was able to set up with some products that I’d actually buy (and have bought one already), so it’ll be easy for me to promote them.

Here it is, my web store is open! I’ll start my marketing with a Squidoo Lens, then use what I’ve learned on Squidoo to spread my marketing out. Check it out, and let me know what you think!

Your Number One Source

For Automotive Back Up Cameras, Stereos,

CD, DVD, GPS and Handsfree Bluetooth

                                                NRI Cyber Sales

I haven’t been working on any new Lenses, instead I’ve been taking a close look at the existing 10 that I’ve published so far.

My second Lens,  Tips And Ideas For Designing A Successful Website, is my highest ranked, and half the traffic is coming from Google. I spruced this up a bit first, but I still plan on doing more.

I’m more than half way through the others, but I seem to be so distracted this week. Still, even though I didn’t publish any new Lenses, I did get ideas for new ones, even filing some research for something I think may turn out to be my most ambitious Lens to date.

Besides that, I have another project pretty close to launch which I will probably use Squidoo for my initual promotion. That’s one reason I’m working on my existing Lenses so much. If I use a Lens to promote this project, it needs to as good as possible, and I can only expect some people will look at my other Lenses and judge me based on all my Lenses. (I know I would!)

Even if I didn’t publish any new Lenses, this was an exciting week: I got my first two Squid Angel blessings. I’ve been visited by Squid Angels before, and I celebrate all comments, but this is the first and second time I’ve been left comments saying I’d been blessed.

First, my Greg Lake, Not Just One Third Of Emerson, Lake & Palmer Lens was blessed by chefkeem, then a couple of days later, rockycha blessed my The Love Of Dragons: Dragons In Books And On Video Lens.

Wow! What a rush!

Speaking of my Dragon Lens, it’s entered in enslavedbyfaeries’ Squid’s Choice Awards for September which is  MYTHS, LEGENDS AND FOLKLORE themed. So if you’re a fan of such things, head over and check out all the great Lenses that have been entered.  Vote for your favorites! You can vote more than once, so I’ve voted on my own, but I’ve also voted on others (after I visited them to check them out, of course)!

I’ve got some pretty good competition and have no illusions of being number one, but I wouldn’t mind some more votes, if your so inclined!

I heard, probably over twitter, that there was a new update for Google Chrome.

I upgraded on my Vista laptop, and my biggest problem remains the virtual scrolling. That’s probably the biggest reason I stopped using it. It works when I use the touch pad to scroll down, but not for going up. I have not encountered it with any other application I’ve used on the laptop, so I’m not sure if there’s anything I can do to fix it, but I can’t see playing around with settings when everything else works.

The other thing is that this Squidoo Lens still looks bad when viewing with Chrome:
Affiliate Marketing Guide : Helping Newbies Earn Extra Money from Affiliate Programs

It looks fine when looking at it using IE and FireFox, so don’t think it’s my computer.

If the virtual scrolling was working right, I’d use Chrome a lot more. My fingers are so trained to use the virtual scrolling, it really slows me down not having it.

BTW, if you haven’t checked out tagfoot, time to do it. If you don’t know what it is, it’s sort of like Delicious and Digg, but then a step or two beyond. You can share not just your bookmarks, but videos, news and a wishlist. There’s also a way to put your Adsense ads on the site. The site is in Beta, but there’s already an active group of Squidoo Lensmasters there.

You want to be on the ground floor of this one when it come out of Beta!

Wow, I was sort of ready to finish one of the music Lenses I’ve been playing with, but then this week became “Quest for a new Cordless Grass Trimmer”!

A View From The Front (Click the link to see the pict)

This is my parents’ front yard as seen from the road, depending on where you are standing.

The Front Yard (Click the link)

This is the front yard as seen from the driveway. Not sure if the photo conveys the size, but its about half an acre.

Back Yard (Click the link)

Here’s the back yard from a single angle. It’s smaller than the front. Or at least the part that gets mowed is.

Beyond The Back Yard (Last pict, I promise)

Even further back, the over grown raspberry bushes are to the left, and out of frame on the right are the remains of two truck bodies my grandfather used for storage. Straight back is where my late dog lived over 20 years ago, and if you were ever curious about where that tree in my Lensmaster photo comes from, its just a bit further than the camera can see from here.

This Summer I decided to help my dad out by taking care of his lawn. This is the first time I’ve done this since I was in High School (I won’t peg it down, but let’s just say that my dog was still around back then).

Back when I did the lawn, I had no grass trimmer. I did most of the edge work with a push mower. Heck, until the last year or so that I did it, I did the whole thing with a push mower. Now I find out that there is no push mower, and my dad has a gas powered grass trimmer.

First time I’ve ever used a grass trimmer, and it wasn’t fun. Noisy, smelly, dirty, heavy… and it wouldn’t even run long enough to do the whole job. It probably needs a tune up, but we just spent a couple of hundred in repairs on the rider mower, and my dad said the trimmer hadn’t even worked well when he first used it.

I couldn’t see throwing good money at this thing, and even if it was working correctly, I firmly believe gas powered trimmers are bad for our health, and they certainly add to the air pollution in our environment. They are a dirty technology who’s time is past. Next year I may get the Black & Decker 19-Inch 24-Volt Cordless Electric Mulching Lawn Mower #CMM1200. I may not do the whole yard with it, but I’ll certainly do as much of it as possible and reduce the exhaust I breath, and pollution I’m adding to the environment.

Enter the Black & Decker cordless electric lawn products. A complete line of cordless tools, and the batteries are inter-changable. I’m not sure about the other products, but the Black & Decker 18-Volt Cordless Electric 12-Inch Grass Hog String Trimmer/Edger #NST2018, which is what I ended up buying, comes with two 18 volt batteries.

It has been over a month since I last tried to use the gas trimmer, so there was more to trim than there should have been. Read how it turned out at Gas Or Electric String Trimmers.

My newest Lens, Greg Lake, Not Just One Third Of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, almost built itself!

I decided to write this one way back when I was writing my Lens on King Crimson. Greg was the original lead singer for King Crimson, so as I was reseaching, and gathering material, I couldn’t help but also collect intel on Greg, too.

Even thought this sat in WIP for a few weeks until I could fine tune and organize it, most of the work was done. I do want to credit MrLewisSmile for turning me on to FoxyTunes with his Lens Building with FoxyTunes (a cool free little tool) post at SquidooCool.com. I was able to use it to finish up this Lens, and I can already see how it’ll cut down my research time in the future.

Anyhow, while finishing this, I started collecting intel on another future Lens, it’s also related to King Crimson and Greg Lake. It just seems to make sense to start new ones as soon as I think of them, and add any material to them I come accross as I’m working on other Lenses, otherwise I’ll just be going over the same ground later.

Time to run. I need to catch up on my reading before I go back to Lens Building!