If you don’t already know, the prime purpose of SquidUtils is to provide tools and utilities for Lensmasters. You can get a summary of what’s on offer here by reading the post Welcome to SquidUtils, and then come back here to catch up with what’s new.
In recent weeks, I have been building some new tools, and they range from the useful, through kinda nifty, to simply awesome. It wasn’t until today I realised how many I had ’sitting on the shelf’, so I thought I should get them out for Lensmasters to try.
Health-Check: This was mentioned at the end of my previous post, where I talked about large percentage of lenses that were not optimised for their keywords. The Lens Health-Check Tool will automatically assess your lens, and give advice on where you could improve it. It is still technically in Beta, and there is some functionality yet to be programmed into to it, but I wanted people to be able to benefit from it.
Amazon RSS Feeds: This is actually an old tool, which is was a little tricky to use unless you’re already an expert with Amazon’s affiliate program. It basically allows you to dynamically embed Amazon products directly into your lens, selected by Category, Listmania or ASIN. Finding the ‘browse node’ ids for a particular category was never easy, but the Amazon Feed Generator now has an integral node browser, that lets you drill down to the one you need.
But that’s not all of them - there’s more…
Continue reading “New Tools for Squidoo Lensmasters”
One of the oldest tools here at SquidUtils is the Lensmaster Feeds. These are RSS Feeds that contain links to all of your lenses (or groups). These are perfect for syndicating - which will result in many websites linking directly to your lenses. And the great thing is, as you build new lenses, they will automatically appear on all the sites that are publishing your feed.
If you are a frequent user of these feeds, you may notice that your primary Lensmaster feed is now provided directly by Squidoo, and not from SquidUtils any more. But don’t worry, all of your links to the old feeds will be redirected, and all previous syndications will continue to work.
Continue reading “How to Use Your Lensmaster Feed”
First of all, let me take this opportunity to introduce myself. I joined Squidoo in September of 2006, and I’ve build a few lenses in that time, which I have showcased in my Lensography. I think that Squidoo is a fabulous platform, and I have been contributing my bit to its development, as well as creating separate tools on my own website, SquidUtils.com.
On this blog I will show you how to use the various tools that are available, and also share some of the tips that I have picked up in the last 18 months. Until now, I’ve never had anything interesting to write about. Whenever I have had something to say, I would post it to the SquidU forum. Now that I have (finally) setup this blog, I’ll be re-posting and updating some of my previous material, as well as adding new information for Squidoo Lensmasters.
To kick things off, here’s a quick overview of what you can find at SquidUtils: Continue reading “Welcome to the SquidUtils Blog”
