Gatwick Aviation Museum lens

Gatwick Aviation Museum

My first new lens in a while, done for the museum I was at at the weekend. Its been reviewed by the Museum who don't object for the extra publicity and support. Hopefully it will get them a bit more attention from the general public: It has only been up for two days, isn't on google yet and is still getting visits, which is promising. I'm not sure if they use everyclick for online donations, but if so I'll have to hook it in to my lens.

Generally a bit knackered, but otherwise slowly getting back into the swing of things.

The travelling squid arrived this morning so I'll need to complete that and send it on when I get an address for the next person.

A day out - and in the cockpit

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Today was a busy day in Aviation. I missed:
- XH558 at SouthPort Airshow
- XL426 at SouthEnd Visit the Vulcan Day
- Croydon Airport 50th Anniversary flypast
and instead attended one of Gatwick Aviation Museum's few open days.

With not one, but two Avro Shackletons (including one of the only two running Mk3's in the world) and aircraft ranging from an English Electric Lightning to a Harrier Jumpjet, this small unique museum provides a fascinating day out.

Sited in an area of pictoresque countryside just outside Gatwick Airport, the museum's aircraft are housed outdoors, while the buildings contain models, engines and more. Most of the aircraft are either live or under restoration by volunteers. The museum provides extensive educational opportunities for students and has a number of independant volunteers working on the aircraft.

One of the treasures of the collection are indoors in the engine rooms - as well as the Conways, and Avon engines, there are two Bristol Olympus engines from the cancelled TSR2 programme.

As a day out, the day is very much what you make of it. With a little knowledge of aviation (or picking up a guidebook and being prepared to ask questions) the open day is a chance for anyone to learn about classic aircraft and have fun doing it.

So, while I may have missed seeing classic aircraft fly, I think I made the right choice. Besides, the opportunity to have a look inside an Avro Shackleton and get into the cockpit was not one I would pass up.

There is a lens and a full review on the way.

Meanwhile for anyone interested, the museum's official site is at http://www.gatwick-aviation-museum.co.uk/ and their next open day is on October 11th.

Dribs and Drabs

World War Two Bombers just got a bit of a makeover, with a few new images and details.#

Squidoo say that they should resolve the Infolinks issue this week, so that's one thing that I will be interested to see the outcome of.

Aside from that, I have an idea for a new blog, but I'm not honestly sure I have the time at the moment. I'm busy working on a new googlesite, and adding content to Tim and Tobias, so we'll have to see.

Lens reviews and writing

I'm a bit thrown since it seems my aviation lenses, which are mainly meant to introduce people to some really beautiful aircraft have been getting some expert attention.

Corrections are always welcome but after I took a weekend off, it was quite a surprise to find the English Electric Lightning lens had gained a personal anecdote.

More to the point, the Grace Spitfire lens also got an update. The 2nd Taf Spitfire book is now linked directly to the ML407 website as they sell it new, and have a deal on where you can buy it and the DVD as a bundle. (Click here for more details.) My own fault - I hadn't realised that they don't sell through Amazon themselves so purchasing the book from there does not go towards supporting the Spitfire.

Lenses and writing - so many words so little time!

Well, it's turned out something actually was off on the technical side with Squidoo, so they are looking into the bug now. Hopefully that will get sorted soon.

Meanwhile I'm torn between lenses and other work (about 20,000 words to go to finish novel #3). I've got two more lenses half done on historical topics but they just aren't at point I am happy with yet.

I am not sure whether to add an embedded forum to my aviation lenses. The test with Drag cave was sucessful, but I don't really have time to moderate two forums, so it might have to wait for a while.

Update on Infolinks payments & Squidoo

Ok, something is odd here:

I compared three lenses:
- the average lensrank put them solidly in Tier 2 for the month (high 3,000's, 5,000's and 6'000's)
- They had not had commercial clickouts, royalties or sales and had none owing (all three are informational)
- One had the infolinks turned off, the others had them left on.

Guess which one earned twice as much as the other two? Yeah. I'm left scratching my head and wondering what exactly is going on.

This is not a good incentive to keep infolinks turned on.

This may prove to be a bug, but right now I am baffled.

(Lenses in quesion: Great Western Railway, the Untouchables and Flying Scotsman.)

Squidoo payments - and glitches?

Something's not right here.

The blue box for this month has turned up. It's the first month's payments to include infolinks on Squidoo, and had a message stating "it's true lensmasters willing to give them a spin are seeing a boost in payments."

Except that I, along with a number of other lensmasters, found our revenues actually decreased. Some have stated they are down by $60-70 (More here). What is really odd is that the lenses where I left infolinks on earned less than the couple where I turned them off!

There are a few people saying that the blue boxes are glitchy, but since the money's come across that seems unlikely.

I'll update if more comes up, but at the moment I'm pretty glad that I've been writing elsewhere and not putting all my time on that one site!

In better news, Redgage also made one of my uploads featured content, (the video of the Bournemouth airshow) and the google sites I did are starting to get some visitors.

I might migrate my steam train content off Squidoo to its own site. I've been thinking about it for a while, and frankly it would probably make more sense right now.

Signing out for the moment, with some thinking to do about where I publish online content.

A Lotus Update

According to Lotus Central, 15th September 2009, it looks as though Team Lotus are in for the 2010 Forumla One Season (got to love Twitter for breaking news!). My Lotus lens has a link to the full story.

If they are in, then now they just need to live up to the name.

I am currently rather busy trying to finish a manuscript off, but once done I should have a bit more time to tweak some more of my lenses!

Run off my feet right now...

Well, novel number 3 is up to 30,000 words. On top of this, I've

• done some work on Google sites


• Found out how to embed script includes like stores in Google sites



• Worked out a way to revise a few of my lenses


• started working on the best way to publish my short stories online

And among all this I'm still finding the time to vote Jasper for cutest dog!

Kid's Books

It seems to be my day to work on Kids books. After I hooked up analytics I was quite surprised by the visits to timandtobias on google sites, especially since I haven't finished it (images, character lists, reviews etc. are still needed) so that's about to get some extra work done and a google sitemap.

And at the same time I'm updating the XH558 lens to include Vulcan Ventures, the children's book by Edmond Squibb about the Vulcan. In some ways this is good for reaching a new audience since it's actually listed on Amazon.com for US sales. However in other ways it is disappointing as it is shown as out of print on the US site, which may discourage customers. US Vulcan fans will need to pick it up from Amazon.co.uk at the moment.

Of course, if enough US customers add it to their wishlist on Amazon.com then maybe some sellers will start importing.

A Flickr problem

Right, well, it seems there is a small problem with FlickR on Squidoo.

A few weeks ago Squidoo changed the FlickR module to make sure all the images it pulls in are creative commons, or ones that you own the rights to. This should not have affected my lenses in the slightest (I own most and the rest are set to creative commons), so I didn't pay much attention.

And then I got the comment - a very polite one but nonetheless one pointing out that Flickr was pulling in the wrong images about Biggin Hill 2009. That it was in fact pulling in the commenter's images, which were not Biggin Hill 2009.

So I checked it. Yep, apparently the Flickr module now interprets a request to produce "Biggin Hill Airshow 2009" photos from my username, as one that should produce his (extremely good) photos of Eastbourne Airshow 2009. Headdesk.

Ater much frantic coding failed to fix the issue, I gave up and pulled the whole Flickr gallery. Since I don't know if the problem is FlickR or Squidoo (I suspect the change made a few weeks back) the images are now linked off Redgage: Click here to view.

This now means I have 200 lenses to run through and see what other deranged and highly embarrassing subsitutions have been made by the new Flickr module. Just what I need on a Monday morning, but at least I now know about the problem.

And once again, my most sincere apologies are offered to the person in question. Thanks for being so polite about it.

(And if anyone else notices something like that on a lens, please let me know.)

In other news, my newer project Tim and Tobias a google site is now live. I'm moving my freehosts site across to google sites as it's easier and quicker to integrate Google than build a site from scratch.

Lots of typing - just not many articles

20,000+ words fully typed edited in two days and several more thousand not typed up or edited. Therefore I have not been exactly active on Squidoo or anywhere else.

On the other hand, this project should hopefully be a quick one (before my fingers fall off from the typing).

Sleep would also be good.