My next lens is part II of Ancient Greece Odyssey: The Acropolis of Athens, posted 5/22/07.

What This Lens is About

My third day in Athens, visiting the Parthenon and monuments of the Acropolis. Originally it also covered the Museum of Athens, but that’s now a separate lens.

Excerpt

The Parthenon was massive, powerful, yet as familiar as my hand. There it stood high over Athens in the blue sky, sun, and open air. The wind was gentle, yet its soft breath added a sense of timeless presence and the natural world. Birds added a lively presence to silent stone: pigeons, doves, magpies, sparrows and swallows.

The old marble is faint gold. How many have walked there? I nearly shed my shoes again, but we had to keep moving. Our guide, Anna, provided a quick orientation to the Acropolis: the sack by the Persians, the Periclean building program (Parthenon’s dates: 448-447 BCE), the Parthenon’s use and the damage it suffered in recent millennia.

Why I Made This Lens

Yet again, my goal for Ancient Greece Odyssey is to share my journey to and love of ancient Greek sites.

Things I Learned Making This Lens

Vary blocks of text and photo galleries. Too much of anything gets long. I also found and linked to a good site on Greek art history where my readers could go for more details instead of filling the lens with too much info.

Things I DIDN’T Learn Making This Lens

Yet again I tried to cover too much on one lens: a whole day in Athens which included multiple museums and monuments. Keep lenses focused on one topic. Don’t use artificial divisions like days. Break your topic into smaller chunks and link lenses together. I later broke the “museums” section onto a separate lens.

Lens Stats and Milestones

As of today: Lensrank #32,795, 14 ratings, 4 favorites, 6734 lifetime visitors.

Best lensrank achieved: #943. Lifetime earnings: $27.58.

Related Lenses:

• Part One: Arrival in Athens
• Part Two: The Acropolis of Athens
• Part Two B: Museums of Athens
• Part Three: Eleusis, Demeter and Persephone
• Part Four: The Temple of Apollo at Delphi
• Part Five: The Citadel of Mycenae
• Part Six: The Palace of Tiryns
• Part Seven: The Sanctuary of Epidaurus

Link:

Part Two: The Acropolis of Athens

My seventh lens, Easy Kitemaking: How to Build a Pyramid Kite, was published 5/22/07. It’s one of my favorite and most successful lenses! And it may well be the OLDEST webpage on Squidoo — see below!

Note: My sixth lens, War in the 21st Century: A New (and costly) Paradigm was about the cost of the War on Terror. (I wrote it on 5/10/07. I was even more right than I knew, but it’s not a fun lens to recap.)

What This Lens is About

Easy instructions on how to build a tetrahendron-shaped kite using plastic drinking straws, kitchen twine and mylar or wrapping paper. (Wrapping tissue works great).

Why I Made This Lens

How to Build a Pyramid Kite is actually one of my oldest webpages! I first uploaded it in early 1994, when the web was a place to share free resources, research, and information– commercial use of the internet was actually illegal in the early years!  I didn’t have much to offer, but I knew how to make a kite, so I made this page. The lens still has my old graphics from my Mac LC.

I’ve added an introduction, Amazon and video modules, but the how-to part of the lens may be oldest webpage to be re-hosted on Squidoo.

Things I Learned Making This Lens

Monitor traffic stats and adjust your content to fit popular searches!

I quickly noticed a lot of students coming to my lens searching for “how to build a pyramid.”  So I added a note in the introduction telling students how to adapt my kitemaking instructions to build an Egyptian pyramid, and made them a stone-wall texture they could print out and use to wrap their “pyramid”. (Bonus — the graphic gave me more clickthroughs.)

Targeted Amazon Module

This lens seemed like one I could monetize. I am a kite connoisseur, so I gave a sincere recommendation for my favorite commercial kite, a little pocket kite that I’ve flown for years. Few of my lenses get sales, but this module does, because it’s clearly a personal recommendation of a product that the author has honest-to-gosh used.

Outdoor Products Are Seasonal

The longterm traffic stats graph for this lens is fun. There’s a Squidoo bug making my traffic stats not display properly, but you can really tell when kite-flying season is:

You’d see similar trends on beach toys and snow toys.

Things I DIDN’T Learn Making This Lens

The introduction module is a bit long. I give a little education about Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of this design) before getting to the how-to part.  I ponder deleting this, but his name attracts keyword searches. I started with a catchy phrase … “it’s a bird, it’s a plane…” which is not the most effective way to “bait” search engine results.

Also, I forgot that a pyramid isn’t really a tetrahedron. Whoops.

Lens Stats and Milestones

PURPLE STAR!

As of today: Lensrank #2,508, 15 ratings, 1 favorite, 20217 lifetime visitors.
Best lensrank achieved: #191. Lifetime earnings: $90.59

Link:

Basic Kitemaking: How to Build a Pyramid Kite