Good Intentions & More Squidoo

As a college professor, typically during summer I spend until the first of August or so doing non-school related projects (e.g. I goof off). This summer, I have the best of intentions. I want to prepare all of my material for my fall classes before I goof off for the summer.

We'll see how it goes. I've had some excuses to slack off a bit recently, since I have to order textbooks to review and they haven't arrived yet. But I have one class I want to take a completely different approach with than in the past, so there will be a significant amount of work preparing for that one.

Another intention is that I don't spend the entire summer creating new Squidoo pages. I'm not sure how I'll do at that one. I've already, since the Roleplaying With Kids lens was nominated lens of the day, written a couple more (one on Murder Mystery Party Ideas, and one on a review of a particular murder mystery party scenario, Curse of the Pharoah).

And may I just say, "Holy crap!" I just went over to Squidoo to get the links for the lenses I mentioned above, and found that Roleplaying With Kids is now ranked #25 out of over 100,000 lenses.

This is a big deal, because the lens was ranked #2,184 before being named lens of the day. It jumped to #105, then to #57, and now to #25. I know that this sort of trend cannot continue, because the lens simply doesn't get the traffic needed to sustain a high ranking (not that many people care about roleplaying with kids). Right now it's riding the lens of the day traffic. In fact, that traffic has dropped off considerably, so I can only imagine that lens rank takes the traffic in the last 7 days into account (that's a statistic shown prominently in your Squidoo dashboard).

As soon as the lens of the day traffic drops off the end of the 7 day period, the lens will start falling in rank.

But it's really cool to have one that close to #1, even if it's more or less a fluke. I'll have to resist the urge to keep writing more in the hopes of getting another one up that high.

Just as soon as I finish off the murder mystery party reviews for the other three or four scenarios I've run. ;-)