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Magicality has updated the Squidoo Dashboard Extension for the new Squidoo Dashboard. Currently it only offers totals and averages of your lenses, but it’s still nice because it will give you a revenue total on your current pending dashboard lenses and such.
If you were going through withdrawal, download the updated squidoo DE here. See the full Squid U forum thread for more details.
I’ve been trying to pound out some lenses today and have been struggling (as usual) with the unwieldy size of my dashboard. Having 300 lenses listed in one place is great for my ego, but not for getting anything productive done. Opening multiple accounts doesn’t really solve much but forcing me to remember more logins and passwords (as if I don’t have enough of those already!).
That being said, here’s how I would fix the dashboard:
- Once you hit a certain number of lenses (50,100?) the dashboard would automatically change to a new format. HQ could afford to make the new dash more feature intensive because many fewer people would be using it, allowing the Squid Servers to keep up.
- This Dash would allow me to one-click publish my lenses. ( a pipe dream but it had to be said).
- Ability to edit keywords, title tags and republish without leaving the Dashboard.
- Sort by primary tag. Why? Lots of reasons.� Read The Importance of the Primary Tag by Fluffanutta for an overview.
- One Screen lens creation. I absolutely hate having to load 4 screens to create a lens. After doing it over 300 times I pretty much have those little sayings memorized. Creating lenses from the dashboard functionality would add extra bonus points.
- Ability to define groups and folders for lenses. Easily view groups and folders of lenses. The Dashboard Extender by Magicality currently does this, but the load times are so horrific for a large group of lenses that it’s not worth turning on.
- Advanced sorting and search functionality. I want to be able to view all of my lenses that have less than X visitors and fall between X,XXX and XX,XXX Lensrank. This is huge for maintaining a large group of lenses and difficult to do currently.
- Access to the Lens RSS feed as a link from the Dashboard. Why don’t we already have this?
- Lens specific earnings reports by day. I want to see which lenses made sales yesterday and through which affiliates.
- Aggregated click through reporting. How many clicks did I send to ebay and amazon yesterday? What lenses did they come from?
- Ability to create Module Templates. I almost always select ‘I want to do my own thing’ and then load in the exact same modules, especially when I’m doing a group of similar lenses. The ability to roll my own pre-set module groupings would be amazing.
- Back up all lenses as a ZIP file.
- Have a ‘Saved Plexo’ list. Goes back to creating similar lenses. Keeping another window open for the sole purpose of grabbing the same plexo over and over is easy to fix.
- Easier Co-Brand creation. Instead of going to each co-brand home page to create a lens, how about a drop down on the dashboard (or new one-page lens making screen) that lets you select your co-brand?
Perhaps I’m not using squidoo as intended, but I am more concerned about overall performance and performance of clusters/themes of lenses than I am with the performance of any one lens. Before I go and build 20 lenses to flesh out an idea, I like to have enough data to tell if that idea is going to make money and scales well. Up to now, doing that is kind of painful just for the number of screens I have to load and the amount of manual calculation I have to do.
What would you add? what’s on your Squidoo Dashboard Wishlist?
The latest release of the Squidoo Dashboard Extender by Magicality has added a fantastic feature. You can now ‘tag’ your lenses in order to sort them into groups. This is a great way to manage chunks of lenses instead of having to look at a giant lens list to decide what to do next.
Don’t have the DE yet?
Check out the lens for all the cool information related to it.
You can also download the plug-in from this link.
Don’t have Firefox?
You need it! All of the tools I am developing for you folks will be in Firefox and I can’t guarantee they will transfer into IE. So, Go get Firefox .
-The Captain