Joan's Squidoo Blog

AND A WINNER IS  .  .  .  JOAN HALL for “STINGING NETTLE”!

Wow, this thing is heavier than I expected.  Gee, what an incredible moment!  This is something I’ve dreamed of since . . . gosh, I don’t know how long.

I’d like to thank the angels for looking down over this lens.  And I want to thank everybody who inspired me to pursue my dream of becoming a Giant Squid.  And of course, thank you to the stinging nettle for being such a fascinating weed to write about.

If I can inspire just one person to freak out their family and friends by feeding them weeds, my purpose will have been accomplished.  Thank you so much, everybody!  Good night!

My fan club membership has grown a bit, so I think I’ll starting doing three lenses instead of two each time I do this.

So, who’s got a cool lens sitting at the bottom of their stack?

My buddy Sweta’s lowest-ranked lens right now is promoting a Google group, the Irrigation Help Group, which gives information and support to people who are self-installing irrigation systems for their yards or gardens.  A great idea from one of the greenest lensmasters around.

Pastor Kay’s bottom lens is part of her series of hymn lenses.  This one is Rescue the Perishing by Fanny Crosby.  Lyrics, MP3 links, sheet music links, and videos, plus your chance to rate the song.

And if you’re wondering what your grandmother might want for Christmas, you would do well to look at GramaBarb’s lens, GramaBarb’s Wish List.  Books, DVDs, travel gear . . . Grandma wants something more intellectually stimulating than a pair of fuzzy slippers, OK?

MY current lowest-ranked lens is a personal list of my favorite benefits of having my babies at home.  My birth stories are included, and you’re welcome to add your opinions, too.

Today my top lens, Best “one-rehearsal songs” for gospel choir, is lensranked at 935!  I’m stoked!

It’s #33 in Music, right between KISS and Hannah Montana.

This is the highest-trafficked lens I have as well, and it has the most click-outs.  I had made it in hopes that other choir directors would add items to the plexos so that I could learn about songs to teach to my own choir, but that hasn’t happened (yet).  But clearly the lens has been beneficial to a lot of other people, so I feel good about that.

Just saw a great tweet from GiantSquidTips: “Take a good look at your top 10 lenses. How are they different from your bottom 10 lenses? Fix it!”.  So I’m fresh back from looking at my dashboard and comparing my top 10 to my bottom 10.  Here’s what I see.

Among my top 10 lenses:

• 5 are a part of my primary niche, gospel choir music.
• 3 focus on something “great” or popular (“Moondance”, one of the greatest pop songs ever;  “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!”, a very popular radio show;  and the awarding of the Nobel Prize to our President).
• 1 is of specific interest to the Squidoo community (it’s my Squidoo journey and testimonial).
• 1 is a topic that is relevant to almost everyone but rarely discussed (handling our online accounts in case of unexpected death).  Also, this lens is new and people are checking it out.

Among my bottom 10 lenses, none of them are in my main niches (choir directing or edible weeds):

• 2 relate to homeschooling, which is a popular topic but one with lots of competition.  I’m thinking it takes dedication to making some really awesome content and connecting with the community to get noticed.
• 4 are on topics that I have written very little (or nothing) else about (driving, pro-life politics, home birth, and the “Best New Artist” Grammy Awards).
• 1 is an About Me page that really is a bit dry.  I’m planning to revise it and juice it up, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.
• 2 are seasonal, a Christmas play and an Easter play.  I should be thinking now about how to promote the Christmas one in the upcoming weeks so that it will be ready to receive its fair share of attention when its time comes.

If you’re counting, you noticed that I just accounted for 9 of my bottom 10.  That leaves one lens that just doesn’t seem to belong at the bottom of the barrel.  It’s a review of one of the greatest movies of all time, Dr. Strangelove.  It’s more similar to my “Moondance” lens or my “Dobie Gillis” lens than it is to the rest of the bottom 10 here.  The people who have seen it have really liked it (Gil himself raved about it when I put it up on the Critique forum at SquidU!).  But it’s just not getting seen.  What’s up?

Well, I just took another look at it now that I’m starting to understand more about search engine optimization and stuff.  I think the title and the intro are good (it might be a good idea, though, to get Stanley Kubrick’s name into the intro).  The module titles are pretty good.  I did a little bit of lensrolling.  But the big, eye-popping red flag is that this lens has only one tag!  At the time I was writing it, I didn’t know how to tag it, so I just didn’t do anything!

My plan for this lens — tag it, tweet it, blog it, and try to make a few more connections.  We’ll see what happens.

I just posted my first RocketMoms lens.  It’s on a subject that I’ve needed to think about for a long time.  So many important parts of our family’s life are managed through online accounts that only I know how to access.  If I were suddenly not here, how would my loved ones manage them?

I’m also connected with online social networks and email groups.  I would like for all of those connections to be resolved smoothly and not leave people wondering what the heck happened to me.

My new lens is documenting the process as I make plans for how all that information will be passed on in the event that I pass on.

You may very well be in need of the same kind of plan, so take a look at the lens:

How would he get to my PayPal account if I died tomorrow?

I’m not sure if this is a new lens or if I had just missed it before.

Just added wayfarer’s lens “Edible Wild Plants” to my edible wild plants lensography.

Today, Faith Salie made her first appearance as a panelist on the radio show Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!

I’ve added a module to my Wait Wait lens with my first impressions of her and a bit from her Wiki-bio.  She has also been added to the “Vote for your favorite panelist” poll.

It’s that time of the week again.  Let’s find a couple of buried treasures here in my fan-club . . .

Allan Wallace’s lowest-ranked lens is a chapter from the novel he’s publishing on Squidoo — Complicit Simplicity 21.

My pal Kim’s lowest-ranked has got some valuable information on Choosing Children’s Outdoor Play Equipment.  And it was the first lens she ever made!  Impressive work right out of the gate!

My current lowest-ranked is The Consistent Life Ethic, presenting a set of viewpoints that defies the usual categorization of liberal-vs-conservative.

For the month of October:

• I’ve added new couples to the  Famous Couples Caption Contest.  Since it’s Halloween month, I added two couples who are popular for couples costumes: Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, and the Frankenstein monster and his bride.
• I’m working on some music-related stuff for the holidays that will be released this month.

I’ll be tweeting about stuff, including my Squidoo lenses, at HeyJoan.

I also started a Twitter account for choir-related tweets, TheChoirLady.  I’m putting links to that one on my choir lenses, but the tweeting would probably only be of interest to choir people.