Progress Report on Turning Lenses into Hubs
This is even more of a nightmare than I thought it would be. When I started on Squidoo in 2009, no one was as picky about photo attribution as they are now. I hadn't been deliberately building a collection of photos for use online yet, so was using some from Photobucket back when it seemed to be allowed. I was also using Zazzle product pictures to illustrate some modules or to make a point. Also, I had used a lot of what Squidoo used to call the black box module as transitions from one text module to another. HubPages doesn't supply capule that will put your quote on a colored background.
I was reworking one particular lens until 2AM this morning (a total of about two hours) just replacing or deleting what won't transfer. I can easily replace the black boxes with quotes on photos at Quozio or Picmonkey and I did that. They look even better than the old black boxes did. I found replacements for the Photobucket photos at Pixabay and from my own collection, but I don't know how to animate them to make them more like what they were replacing. Everything from Zazzle just had to go.
That particular lens depended a lot on specific music to be availble to listen to, and YouTube didn't have the most important song anymore. I had replaced it with an Amazon MP3 module that played part of the song. HubPages doesn't have a comparable capsule.
I think the lens will convert to a Hub now, but it will still need editing within the framework of what HubPages may make available or have available when we can edit them there. I feel that the work I created on Squidoo was gutted to prepare it for HubPages. It just wasn't designed for that platform. Many other lenses would also be gutted over there. They were never intended to be informational articles. They were more like human interest pieces.
I wrote a detailed analysis of my work on this particular lens in a blog post on Barb's Writing Life , my self-hosted Wordpress blog, this morning. It gets down to specifics. I will have a lot more work over the next week to see which lenses are worth transfering. If I have to do almost complete rewrites, I may delete the new Hubpages account and just post the edited versions to my current HubPages account.
How are other about-to-be former lensmasters faring so far? Squidoo has its tentacles in a twist again and I haven't been able to see this month's payout report yet or to download content from individual lenses while they are in edit mode as I used to do. I guess I'll have to wait for them to prepare the official download all lenses.
Text is original and may not be used without permission.
The photo shows me in a T-shirt that was part of a prize I was awarded from something I accomplished on HubPages. It may have been one of my Hub of the Day Awards. I got a nifty little notebook that said HubPages on the front for storing my writing ideas along with it. It was totally unexpected, but much appreciated. I only wish the shirt was large enough to wear in public.
B. Radisavljevic, Copyright 2014, All Rights Reserved
transition-from-Squidoo-to-Hubpages
Image Credit » I took the selfie.
Comments
Ellis wrote on August 17, 2014, 4:31 PM
I didn't write for either so I have been spared all that work..
poddys wrote on August 17, 2014, 5:01 PM
Oh dear, I was hoping that much of this would be automatic, if not perfect, but if it's like this I will have to manually rework every single lens. That's MAJOR work and I just don't have the time. "Drat drat and double drat" as Dick Dastardly would say.
BarbRad wrote on August 17, 2014, 5:34 PM
You are fortunate.
BarbRad wrote on August 17, 2014, 5:36 PM
It will be major work. Better make sure you have copies of everything. I hope they have my zip file ready soon in case I haven't gotten around to copying every thing before.
Kasman wrote on August 17, 2014, 5:40 PM
I don't have too many lenses on Squidoo and what I do have will have to take its chances of transferring smoothly. I am not inclined to spend too much time manually converting them so any which involve too much work will simply be deleted and (maybe) rewritten at some future date.
inertia4 wrote on August 17, 2014, 7:10 PM
BarbRad It sure seems you have your work cut out for you with this. I am glad I don't have my account there anymore. I have my hands full here and a few other sites.
LoudMan wrote on August 17, 2014, 7:33 PM
And another one bites the dust. And another one's gone and another one's gone. Another one bites the dust! -Queen
BarbRad wrote on August 17, 2014, 11:28 PM
Good luck. Maybe you wrote the sort of lenses that will make a smooth transition, since you write lots of information. Unless you did what I did and wrote differently on Squidoo.
BarbRad wrote on August 17, 2014, 11:29 PM
Yup. I think some of my best lenses will be going on my own sites as soon as I have time to copy what I need. They just won't work on HubPages.
BarbRad wrote on August 17, 2014, 11:31 PM
I wonder which "altruistic" site owner will be the next to see his site doesn't work anymore.
Kasman wrote on August 18, 2014, 5:11 PM
Yes I did. I wrote about Scotland and also had a couple of review lenses.
OldRoadsOnceTraveled wrote on August 19, 2014, 7:28 PM
Squidoo had just locked three of my lenses (and of course never bothered to tell me why). I was just there the night before the announcement looking at them to see if I could see anything obvious, but the only things I could think of was a couple of products no longer available and a few dead links to my Yahoo articles, although the featured lenses still had those, too. For the little bit of money I had made off those, I quickly decided it was not worth spending hours and hours trying to figure out what was wrong, what rules had changed, etc. Since the new $25 threshold, I doubted I would ever see another payout, so there was no point. I copied everything on those three and then saved my featured lenses as websites so I would have a permanent record of how they looked (something I belated realized I should have already been doing after a certain other disaster), and made the decision to delete at least the three locked lenses. But I just wasn't ready to let them go yet, so I decided to wait a few days. The next day, I was very glad I hadn't spent more than a few minutes trying to do anything with them.