Featured At Wizzley Under Interesting Authors

Just finished adding a new article today to Wizzley when I've noticed that not only 2 of my articles are on the front page, but also my author link is there (on the right in the screenshot below).

It's fun to be featured for a little while, makes me more motivated to write there.

I like writing at Wizzley and Squidoo as well because I can write about pretty much anything I want. For example my latest article at Wizzley is about the Day of the Dead in Europe. It is a bit different from the Halloween celebration in the US, and I'm pretty sure not everyone knows about this rather somber and serious tradition. If I had to set up a site to write about this topic, I'd get bored of the subject after a few articles.

Here, I wrote what I wanted to say, and now I'm moving on to something else that I want to write about.

On Polishing Rocks And Jewelry

As a jewelry artist, I keep gravitating around the subjects of jewelry and semiprecious gems. Today I took a second look at how to polish rocks and jewelry. The two are not the same, even though initially it might seem so.

Polishing silver is all about tarnished silver cleaning, which means cleaning the final pieces of jewelry (or other silver objects) from that dark urgly layer of deposit that occurs after a while due to the interaction with oxygen.

On the other hand, polishing stones is about taking rough stones (pebbles from the seaside, or rocks from the mountain, those kinds of rocks) and polishing them to a nice shine. Usually rockhounds are searching for beautiful rough rocks, polish them, even cab them (create cabochons out of them) and then sell them to jewelry designers - or keep them for themselves in case they make jewelry as well.

So here is the article I wrote on How to polish stones on Wizzley.

I've noticed that it takes me about the same amount of time to write one lens at Squidoo as it takes me to write 2-3 pages at Wizzley. It's so darn easy writing at Wizzley, and such fun. The tarnished silver cleaning article took on quite an interesting layout with all those moved up, down, left and right modules. I love the side-by-side modules, sadly Squidoo doesn't have this option. I think Hubpages does have it too, but I personally don't like to write there.

At Wizzley I have currently 14 pages and counting. And I've only started there a week ago...

Are You Good With Making Things By Hand?

I like doing crafts, from making jewelry to handmade greeting cards, to bookmarks, polishing gemstones. While I"m a lazy person in general, I'm quite good with some crafts.

Of course this is why I've added a few lenses related to my hobbies, either to showcase some of my works or teach others how to do what I also do.

For example my last lens is on learning how to make a bookmark for a book. My main passion in life is reading books and of course with that many books, I need some bookmarks. While I do buy at times bookmarks and I also trade with other book lovers from all over the world, over time I've also made bookmarks on my own.

It'\s really not difficult and it can be a fun activity when you have kids as well. The lens shows various types of bookmarks that you can make, from simple printing out bookmark templates, to bookmarks make of wood, origami bookmarks, and beaded bookmarks, it's all there. As a jewelry artist, making beaded bookmarks is something I like doing a lot.

Another craft I used to be interested in (sadly not anymore because I simply don't have the time for it) is parchment craft. If you've never heard of it, then head over to the lens called Pergamano - Parchment craft and check out some of the works I've done. Hint, it's about making beautiful handmade greeting cards with vellum paper. Totally awesome stuff!

And of course, making jewelry is another hobby of mine, but I've already mentioned that here in the Designer Jewelry post.

Are you doing any crafts with your hand? It's not only an awesome way to spend your time but it can be also very rewarding and relaxing. Sometimes when I make some piece of jewelry or another, I don't even realize the time flies. I'm somewhere else, in another place, zoned out I guess. And yet, before I know it, the jewelry piece is finished and especially in these cases it turns out to be a real winner.

Tidying Up My Squidoo Lenses

I've come a long way since 2008 when I first made my initial Squidoo lenses. There was a discussion today on the squidu forum about people who didn't get accepted to the Giant Squids. I am one of them so I also posted. Some people looked over my lenses and the critique on my first lenses from 2008 were rather negative.

Swallowing my pride and ego, I went ahead and started a cleanup job on my lenses. Removed some older ones that were just taking up space and were junk, cleaned up a few others (improved titles, added some more modules, etc).

I hope that this update on my Squidoo lenses will help me become a Giant Squid next time. I know that 1-2 years ago the criteria for entering the GS was quite easy, but since then the Squidoo "masters" have tightened ship quite a lot, so the quality has a different meaning now.

Since (hopefully) I'm here for the long haul, I've decided to really play along and do the best work I can here.

For example one lens that I fixed up a bit was about gaming mouses. I'm am avid online gamer and PC gamer, and while waiting for Diablo 3 to arrive (still takes a couple of months), I've decided to review some of the mouses (mice) that I've had experience with.

I've added a better title to the lens, added a few extra modules and made it more appealing to the visitors. Hope it looks better now.

Popular Articles At Wizzley

Just checked out Wizzley and I noticed that two of my articles are on the front page as popular: The Tipping Hairdressers article and the How to do Meditation at Home.

I've never been on the Squidoo frontpage yet, but I guess with a smaller community like at Wizzley, it's easier, so I'l enjoy my fame as long as it lasts!

Google Indexing of Wizzley Pages vs Squidoo Lenses

From what I've noticed, it seems that Wizzley pages get faster indexed in Google than Squidoo lenses.
Take for example one of my first Wizzley pages on doing meditation at home. I made it about 2 days ago and it's indexed.

However one of my Squidoo lenses that I made 10th of October (!!!) on Christmas tree toppers stars is not yet indexed in Google. That is exactly 10 days from when I made the lens.

That is just too weird. Squidoo has a PR 7 and it's loved by Google. Wizzley has only a PR 3 so far, but it seems that Google likes it too.

I do remember checking a few of my previous lenses and they were indexed quite late compared to what I used to see with my own website pages (which were indexed at times in a matter of hours). Maybe it's the fact that Squidoo has so many lenses, maybe it's something else, but it's definitely noteworthy - even if I don't know yet what I'll do with this information.

3 More Wizzley Pages Done

I've spent yesterday and today adding 3 more pages to Wizzley. One more to go and if all goes well, my nofollow backlinks to Squidoo and my site will become dofollow.

So what have I been busy writing about?

The second article was a fun fact finding mission for me. It's about tipping hairdressers. How much to tip them, when it's good to tip and then some other useful tips related to keeping your hairdresser if you really like her (or him). This was a fun Wizzley article to write, I truly had fun with it.

Then this morning I wrote about adding the Wizzley widget to a Wordpress blog. (You can see the widget right here in the previous post about joining Wizzley). The problem with this widget is that it's an iframe code, and Wordpress got rid of all iframe related code for various security reasons. So besically if you add this code to your Wordpress blog, upon publishing, you end with no widget on your blog at all. Btw, As you can see, Blogger blogs have not been affected by this.

So anyway I spent my morning creating a step by step tutorial, taking pictures and putting it all together as a Wizzley post. Hope some people will find it useful. Btw, with this solution you can add pretty much any iframe code to Wordpress, you are not restricted by Wizzley.

And finally this afternoon I wrote another fun article about meaning of eye colors, basically debunking this issue. So many people are trying to find the meanings to their eye colors and are taking online quizzes and reading article after article, and all this is crap really. The article looks at all this and tackles what the truth about eye color really is.

When I look at Wizzley compared to Squidoo, I have a feeling that somehow Squidoo lenses are more commercial in nature, they are more salesy, while Wizzley is more for writing information article. In a way it makes sense, since Adsense takes such a prominent place at Wizzley (we have our own accounts there entered in the preferences, and the money goes directly to our own Adsense payment). For example while at Squidoo I might have a long list of favorite books on a particular subjects, like my Best self-help books for women, I wouldn't do this type of article at Wizzley. But I guess I'll see as I go along and learn more about the Wizzley platform and way of doing things.