Horoscope and Zodiac Jewelry - a lens turning into a blog

One of the advantages of having a hostgator webhosting account is that you can set up as many blogs as you want without having to switch to a more expensive plan. That is: you do of course have to buy the domain name, but the various sites (blogs in my case) are all hosted under one account.

One of the least intuitive things you can do with that system is set up a blog ONLY to promote a lens. I know, weird isn't it? But that's what I just did. I spent two days setting up a blog, creating content, building links on something that I expect will only make me money through the promotion of a squidoo lens or two.
Here's the lens: Astrology Horoscope Jewelry 

It does OK selling zodiac jewelry and it gets decent traffic, but I want it to move up a notch in both search engine traffic and sales. And since I'd already bought the domain, I've set up a blog. It's called, not unsurprisingly:  Horoscope Astrology Jewelry. 

Normally I'd have turned the lens around at this point: linking it to the blog wherever reasonably and perhaps toning down on the content on there. Instead I've done the opposite: linked to the lens and used this as part of my link wheel around that lens.

Why? It has to do with being an international publisher. Amazon makes it real hard to get to their money, because they only pay out by check internationally. And guess what: it's expensive as hell the change them into actual money. So one of the reasons I'm active on squidoo is that for me it pays to have a middle man that pays out through paypal.

Of course, if ever Amazon starts paying out directly to my Dutch bank account, or in some other way where I can get to the money without having to jump through hoops, I can always turn the blog around too: link to the blog from the lens and turn the blog into an online 'hub' or the center of my 'link wheel'.

In the mean time though, that blog is going to get older - and therefore more trusted by Google as well. So it makes sense to host and own it myself, not put it on some free account. All thanks to hostgator.

If sitting makes you fat... then get off your rear and start walking

I've been wanting a treadmill desk for months, every since a friend sent an email with pictures of hers. There was a recent article in the New York Times:

If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.

The last straw for me: I painted my ceiling beams and after stepping up and down off a kitchen chair more times than I can tell you, I jammed my knee and could hardly walk. I got mostly better, then got on my elliptical trainer and the knee got terrible again.

So in a fury I went out and bought an inexpensive home treadmill from Walmart, set it up, and - since I'm a make-your-own type - built my own "work station" for free. Since then I've spent quite a lot of happy time on the treadmill, mostly reading books I've wanted to "get around to" for quite a while, but also working on my laptop, which fits securely on the treadmill desk.

Want to read how I made this simple cheap DIY laptop treadmill desk and see pictures of my workstation and my friend's too? Visit Make your own treadmill desk for free! (BTW, It's only free if you have woodscraps lying around or can scrounge some.)

Look How Easy It Can Be To Break Into A Hotel Guest Room

We travel and stay in hotels or motels all of the time. Most of the time we feel safe. Much of the time that we think we are safe, we are actually fooling ourselves. Have a look at this video showing how surprisingly EASY it is to break into a hotel with the card type lock. Of course the video also shows us a simple technique to stop it with a towel. But not all hotel rooms use the same type of locking system, and many are just as easy to break into:

I have created a lens with some suggestions about how to optimize hotel security. In addition, here are some suggestions about hotel / motel safety from a Kansas police website.

Valentines Day Ideas

A couple of years ago, I made a lens with Valentines Day ideas about how to make Valentines Day very special. It remains one of my best lenses. I have recently refreshed if for this Valentines Day. There are alot of great ideas there and I am very proud of it. I always wanted this lens to be a lens of the day. Maybe one year it will be.

Use Squidoo to research and advertise an event

I'm thrilled with the way I've been able to use my page, Complaints Choirs, as a hub of information for people who might want to join the Complaints Choir I'm starting here in Durham - Chapel Hill NC. On this lens, I've assembled a brief history of the movement (which started in Finland and is going strong across the globe!) and some of my favorite Complaint Choir segments from YouTube.

I built a website for our soon-to-begin group (Complaints Choir, Durham - Chapel Hill headquarters) and on it put a link to my squidoo lens, which has more information than I wanted to put on the local website.

If you've never heard of them, here's an example:

Making a facebook fan page for use with Squidoo and business in general.

As usual, when I hear people talking enthusiastically about something I am tempted to try it myself. I already had a Facebook profile but was very reluctant to mention my lenses there, because it's more a place where I connect with friends, family, and colleagues.

Some lensmasters evidently look at it the other way around: they don't want to annoy their squidoo fans and connections with personal matters.

In either case, the solution may be to create a facebook page. I've got one now: Chapel.Hill.Fiddler on Facebook. I already feel freer to mention business related stuff and to drop a lot of links which my friends and family might consider spam!

I discovered something cool: if you add the application called "Static FBML" (FBML means Facebook Markup Language) you can make tabs or boxes using html, which means you can style them to look more like a webpage - you can have big pictures and links and embed stuff...

... and to make it even more fun, you can set one of the tabs you create to be your Facebook Landing Page, so when people surf to your URL for the first time, they see your special custom page (on subsequent visits they go to the wall page).

I made a landing page with links to a lot of my blogs, and to my squidoo lensography. If you haven't been there before, you should see a page with the heading "What's Going On Here" ? (Go on, go visit, you know you want to! And maybe become my fan while you're there!)

In other news, I've finally managed to get google to index my Best Wedding Songs blog, mainly by pointing to it from various other locations! And I've done a new lens full of research on Complaints Choirs, an absolutely hilarious concept. I'm starting one myself: Complaints Choir, Chapel Hill Headquarters.