Maybe I’m on to something. The Adirondack Hiking Guide was at #101 yesterday. This morning it is now #83! This is with practically no SEO other than a few inbound links. Heck it hasn’t even been rated by anyone. Cool. I wonder what would happen if someone actually gave it a rating? Of my several lenses, I have to say that next to Birding, this one has been something I have put a modicum of effort into creating. The Squidoo Lens is not a revolutionary idea, it’s more like a collection of good ideas rolled into one web service.

Originally, I created this blog without much thought to it’s subject niche, neither in scope or content. I only knew it would be about Adirondack Travel and Tourism. I’d have to say that I’m an information hound, and over the years I’ve collected a huge number of bookmarks. Being in the information business, I’ve had this Adirondack taxonomy in my brain for several years now. I’ve really never had to display it until now. Early on in my blog process, I had determined to have my selected links appear in categories on the sidebar, but this quickly became unmanageable. Sure, who wouldn’t like a clean, cool single column blog? But my need to display my mental taxonomy drove me to seek out more real estate.
Let me take a small detour here and mention WordPress and themes. WordPress is the vehicle, the theme is the make and model. Gee, wouldn’t it be cool if you could change ‘skins’ on your car to suit your mood? Vehicle Theme Switcher? Now there’s a plugin for you. I digress. I’ve been feeling comfortable with the Giraffe theme for awhile now. I love it’s clean look and ease of customizing some of its basic look via a fairly robust theme admin section. It comes with several basic color schemes and a nice header image feature. I also like the ‘tiered’ front page showing current, recent, and older posts. I’ve dabbled with a few other themes, but keep coming back to Giraffe. Maybe this is because I’ve invested time and I’m familiar with the code, but truth is, I just like this theme. Hey John – Kudos! I’m kinda waiting around for the theme to be wigitized, might even try to do it myself. Anyone with any tips on that? John?
Back to the Adirondack Lens situation. What started as one lens, just fooling around with Squidoo, has now become several. My goal is to completely ‘offshore’ my link categories and free up the sidebar. These are now uber-category links which bring you to a specific subject lens. Much easier to manage than the links admin of WordPress, plus you can beef up the description of each link. Additionally, the various modules available really help to enhance each lenses content, particularly the ability to display RSS feeds. Combine that with the excellent Firefox Squidoo plugin and I’ve got a really powerful information system – Web 2.0 flavor.

So if you haven’t visited yet, please check out my Adirondack Guides, rate them, send me feedback and suggestions, and build a few lenses yourself. Easy, just click the ‘Lensmasters Wanted‘ logo and get started today.