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June, 2010:

Advanced CSS Tricks and Tips: Borders and Backgrounds and Captions, Oh My!

Jun 7th, 2010
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

I finally got around to updating my Advanced CSS lens, where I used to post crazy "lab experiments" in CSS.

Now I've reorganized it and made it more dignified (slightly), and added all the tricks I tend to use most on my lenses: rounded corners, background-images for paragraphs, captions under aligned images, drop caps, dramatic numbered lists, and most of all, playing around with the introduction module to make the first thing visitors see look great.

I've moved the old lab experiments to page 2. There's another use for a Page Break!

(My "crazy lab experiments" lens is now ZEE CODE SCRATCHPAD. Once I've got things working nicely there, I may move the "finished products" to the AdvancedCSS lens for prime time viewing.)

How many Squidoo pages are indexed by Google, Yahoo, et alia?

Jun 5th, 2010
by Greekgeek.
2 comments

Addendum -- just because I'm curious -- how many Squidoo pages have the different search engines got indexed?

  • Google: about 1,340,000 from squidoo.com (This was in JANUARY. In June, it is about 398,000! Mayday! Mayday!)
  • Yahoo: Pages (9,671,276)
  • Bing: 446,000 results
  • Altavista: found 9,660,000 results
  • Lycos: 1,107,211 results
  • Ask: 222,500 (? -- I'm not sure if I figured out how to query Ask properly.)

Again, I don't think Google's spiders are less effective than Yahoo's -- no WAY -- but it tosses an awful lot of pages into the "suppemental index" if they seem not to give any good info that can't be found on other pages on the same website. I.E. if you make a lens that's just like a ton of lenses, don't expect it to get seen in Google search results!

To figure out if your lens is indexed, use one of the searches above, then add the title of your lens!

Updating Squidoo Lenses: Staying Fresh

Jun 3rd, 2010
by Greekgeek.
2 comments

After 60 (?) days, a lens loses lensrank because it's not fresh.

Also, Google rewards frequently updated content.

These are two separate things, but they go together.

What are your techniques for keeping lenses fresh?

Here's some of mine.

Quick Fix -- do one of the following

  • While watching TV, I'll sort my dashboard by date (click the date column at top), then edit and re-publish. Don't do all of them on the same day -- stagger them so you're doing 10 or so on different days.
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Squidoo Graphics: Colors, Themes, Black Box Tips

Jun 1st, 2010
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

I've been thinking. Try as I might, I'm a journeyman when it comes to Squidoo SEO: I have the basic techniques down, I know what I'm doing, but I've got the online equivalent of an undergraduate college degree rather than a PhD. Whereas I've been doing computer graphics and layout since 1980, HTML since 1993, and CSS since--well, whenever it first came out.

So I should share more of my tips on graphics and webpage design. Here's a few!

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