A new lens, a book launch, a new ebook and a busy week

A new lens went up:

• History ebooks

This is a reworking of the 2009 lens about Lens Companions. After I looked at the lens companions lens I realised just how out of date it was, and that the URL was no longer appropriate either. So I created a new lens for these ebooks. It has also replaced the blog as the Ciamar Price homepage on Smashwords, as squidoo has a higher pagerank so will send more visitors to the ebooks, but also because any visitors to the lens mean that I get a small share of royalties. It also has a Paypal "coffee jar", largely because a few readers get very suspicious about anything free and want to know the catch.

For the original lens I plan to write an ebook about lens creation and tips and use the lens for that, along with a few other people's titles, rather than waste the work and URL.

To celebrate the new lens, and as if I didn't have enough on with a book launch tomorrow (just in case you'd somehow managed to avoid hearing about it), I've just released another ebook.

The Great Western Railway is a rewrite of the original lulu title. It is currently working its way through Smashwords processing and distribution to flag up any formatting issues that I need to correct.

If you want an advance look, the ebook can be found here:

• The Great Western Railway

I'm also investigating an issue with Project Wonderful that will affect blogs that have erratic traffic, like some of mine, but I want one more piece of test data before blogging that.

New lens #135 Sir Daniel Gooch

#135 Sir Daniel Gooch
http://www.squidoo.com/danielgooch

Admittedly this is mainly to fill a gap in Great Western, since its difficult to do the Great Western Railway without covering Sir Daniel Gooch. Fortunately he is also a fascinating person in his own ight, locomotive engineer turned businessman turned transatlantic cable layer.

Still it's another lens. Hopefully the new ideas will come back soon.

Two news lenses and a new LOTD

#132 Rupert Gould
http://www.squidoo.com/rupertgould
#133 John Harrison
http://www.squidoo.com/johnharrison

Done as tie-ins to my Longitude lens, these are both SquidWho lenses about the people concerned. I don't really get on with the squidowho layout so there's not as much detail as I'd normally put. Still trying to do lens images since there aren't any royal free ones I can use.

And Great Western has been replaced as Lens of the Day by Party_Animal's lens on the new first dog in the US. Congratulations to the new lens of the day!

** Bo, The first dog **

Two new lenses

Well, I'm not quite happy with either of them, but since its been tipping it all morning, I thought I might as well put them live.

#127 GWR Star class Steam Engines
http://www.squidoo.com/star-class-steam-engines
About the Star Class, the first steam engines created for the Great Western Railway after their initial issues with the engines built to Brunel's specifications. These engines gave rise to the successful Firefly class.

The BAC prototype

#128 English Electric Canberra (the B57)
http://www.squidoo.com/english-electric-canberra
Done at the suggestion of Spook, another lensmaster, this one was tricky. The Canberra is still in service with airforces around the world, while most of the aircraft I write about have been long retired. Also, it has a very long service history, 57 years. Rather than try to cover this in detail - it's been done better elsewhere by people more familiar with the plane - I've tried to create the lens as an intro with links to the relevant sites and resources.

Lens of the day

Having missed the extremely, extremely obvious - the little box on the side of the control bar that says Lens of the Day - I can confirm that Great Western Railways actually is Lens of the Day.

I can also confirm I am currently rather shocked, stunned, happy, and going to get a drink since I wasn't sure whether it was the web or me that had gone insane.

ETA: In my defense, I had my head down for a couple of hours working on the Canberra lens and when I popped up to check comments there were more than a few...

Ahem, excuse me for shouting but - I GOT LENS OF THE DAY!!!

Normal, calmer, service resumes shortly.

#120 The Iron Duke GWR steam engines

New lens: #120 The Iron Duke
http://www.squidoo.com/iron-duke-steam-engine

About the Iron Duke class of GWR Broad gauge steam engines, which pulled the Flying Dutchman fast express. This was a spin off from my GWR lens, but I had enough material (just) to make doing this one worthwhile.

The other lens that got a tweak was the one that is now http://www.willardprice.co.uk. A surprising number of visitors aren't familiar with lenses, and didn't realise each book as its own page. A new link by each description should make this more obvious.

#116 Great Western Railway

Lens #116 The Great Western Railway
http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/new_workshop/Great-Western-Railway

This is the one that I was stuck on. Too much information - and I mean that literally. Even pared down to the basic points its one of my longer lenses. The story of the GWR is one of business expediency or technological advice, massive engineering achievements, and one of the most famous Railways the world ever new, built by its greatest engineer.

Still it's up, I think I got everything vital in, and frankly I rather like the look of it.

It also comes with a rather shorter spin-off:

New Lens: #117 http://www.squidoo.com/firefly-steam-engine

Since I'd got so much material about the engines, I thought I'd use it rather than let it go to waste.