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Workshop Upgrade Coming Soon

Megan Casey by Megan Casey on Mon, May 16th, 2011

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As part of the engineering team’s ongoing work with ‘refactoring’ some of the code that powers Squidoo (as described in this previous post), this week we’re going to release another round of refactored code. This set focuses on the lens Workshop.

Because the Workshop is a critical backbone to lensmaking, we’re gone through extensive rounds of testing with the help of nearly 80 lensmasters who were selected from our Beta Testers Pool.

As before, this will be another gentle release, in that there are not many visible or radical changes that you will see.

The benefits of this release:

Most of them will be behind-the-scenes code improvements that you won’t be able to see or touch or taste (taste?).
But you should see slightly faster lens publishing speed within the Workshop. Less hang time after hitting the Publish button.
On-publish lens notifications have been consolidated into a new overlay design, and happen faster. For example, if you publish a lens without enough written in your Intro, you’ll see something like this. When you successfully publish a lens, you’ll see this overlay including some sharing options (which will be changing soon).
A new on-publish duplicate content check: A look for a high degree of duplicate content on a lens will trigger a note like this. Right now this will just be a friendly notification to let you know that we believe your lens might have too much duplicated content that matches (verbatim) content elsewhere on the web. We’ll be tracking to see how many lenses receive this heads-up notification, and which ones, to help us refine our duplicate content filter. For now, receiving this message will have no adverse affect on the lens at all. But I’d encourage you to redouble your efforts to publish original lenses that have more written-by-you unique content than not.

About Megan Casey

Cofounder of Squidoo.

Comments:

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000873833010 Holly Day

Actually the links included in the post don’t work but I can’t wait to see this on-publish duplicate content checker as apart from rules, it also can be a great help for us!

http://www.squidoo.com Megan Casey, Cofounder

The links are working now. Thanks Holly.

http://squidutils.com/ thefluffanutta

There will be a new version of the (unofficial) Workshop Addon too…
Details here: http://www.squidoo.com/lens-workshop-addon/squidcast/1105315-workshop-addon-2-0-

http://www.squidoo.com Megan Casey, Cofounder

Feel free to share any details here for people who might be using your Addon and need help. We won’t scream thread hijacking. :)
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=566235044 Maurice Glaude

Thats good

Anonymous

Faster Publish speeds! New overlay design! Lens might have too much duplicated content! What more could one ask for? Looking forward to it.
http://www.fencing.net/ Craig

Good upgrades. That will make the lenses even better for ranking.
Deb Lauman

I’m all for keeping plagiarism OFF of Squidoo. Just don’t ever want to see lensmasters whose original content has BEEN plagiarized (which happens a lot) get penalized in any way as they fight to get their stolen content removed from other sites. Because it definitely can be a fight, and one that’s sometimes not won.

http://www.squidoo.com Megan Casey, Cofounder

Deb, you’re right that it’s a challenge to determine primacy on the web. We’ve gone through extensive testing with this new duplicate content checker and yes, we have seen some cases where it says ‘dupe’ to a good lens that seems to be the original source — because too many other sites out there grabbed the original lens’s content in entirety and reposted it. However, these cases were very few, and we’re looking at signals for determining greenlighting as well. We certainly don’t aim to hurt our lenses with original content — supporting those lenses and those creative writers is our entire business. While I can’t promise there won’t be some false positives, I do know that we will be very intent to help out lenses that were aggressively duplicated by other people by making sure they don’t get hassled by our dupe checker.

One more thing to mention: There’s a difference between plagiarism and duplication. If a lensmaster takes a lot of his own writing from a lens and reposts it elsewhere on the web, that’s not plagiarism. However, if he does it in too many places, that will hit our radar as ‘aggressively duplicated content’ that matches the lens and could hurt his lens over time. Not just within our Squidoo system, but in search and in human perception. So it’s up to individual lensmasters to figure out how they want to excerpt, link and quote their lenses in their other locations (blogs, facebook, etc) in a smart, web friendly way.

Megan

http://twitter.com/jewelkid87 jewelkid87

I really like these upgrades. Keep up the good work!
http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/bdkz Bonnie Diczhazy

We’re very excited about the upgrades too.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Justin-Alexander-Smith/1384467892 Justin Alexander Smith

Really EXCITED ! i am new someone please like my page.
[Edited to delete link]

http://www.squidoo.com Megan Casey, Cofounder

Glad you’re excited Justin. And welcome to Squidoo. For future reference, blog comments aren’t the place to promote your lenses or other unrelated links.

http://twitter.com/jewelsofawe jewelsofawe

Now I understand what was going on… I wondered why things seemed different.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=566235044 Maurice Glaude

Faster is better, but what about SqudWho….what’s going on with that.
http://twitter.com/KonaGirl June Parker

I am liking this a lot!
http://www.squidoo.com Megan Casey, Cofounder

Update: Most of you have already noticed, but yes, the Workshop release we mentioned in this post went live earlier today. Aaron, our lead developer, has been tracking it all day and says so far so smooth. No related gremlins we’ve seen or heard about.

http://makingamark.blogspot.com/ makingamark

Try reading the bug reports – I’ve found two so far

http://www.squidoo.com Megan Casey, Cofounder

You’re right, I should have said: no widespread bugs or showstoppers that required a rollback last night. The guys are reviewing any bugs that might be related to the Workshop as a priority.

http://makingamark.blogspot.com/ makingamark

On the duplicate content – are you going to differentiate between the automatic website generated description of the site – which is already on the net and is which is what you get when you click the links link “Retrieve details for this URL” and content which has been duplicated in other ways?

http://www.squidoo.com Megan Casey, Cofounder

Yes. Those descriptions and meta-descriptions aren’t counted as duplicate content, for our purposes.

http://profiles.google.com/hlkljgk Heather Katsoulis

the update really speeds publishing up – thanks hq. :)
Christine P.

All of your hard work is appreciated! My only “negative” comment is about the overlay after publishing a lens. GRRR…I don’t like anything that makes me add another click in my routine. Now every time I publish I have to make an extra click to get where I’m going. (since I never FACEBOOK, etc.) Petty and only a matter of milliseconds but that’s my feedback on that. Overall though, positive changes as always.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_LQUI2MT6YLBOQB2LUE5HXPRFVQ Kylyssa

Will the 80% unique to Squidoo content and 20% duplicate content as stated on the FAQ apply or will lenses with less than 20% duplicate content be flagged by this system as well? Will there be an announcement when the bugs with it are fixed (when it stops giving false positives) so we can go back to maintaining our lenses as usual?
Anonymous

Love this:
But you should see slightly faster lens publishing speed within the Workshop. Less hang time after hitting the Publish button.

I don’t like that short lens intros seems to be affecting lens rank. Sure, suggest that we make it longer, but I can think of instances where you might want a short intro. For example, one of my lenses leads into a bulleted list module that contains a lot of what would go into the intro, but I just wanted it bulleted, so I kept the intro short so it would direct people to the second module without being redundant.

I think sometimes having a short intro is good when you have content that doesn’t need extensive introduction. Sometimes it’s better to just let people get into the meat of things.
http://twitter.com/CaroPowell Caroline Powell

I came and looked here because I found a lensmaster with 10 lenses. They are all precisely the same content, just very blatantly spun through a content spinner. Does squidoo want to know about such stuff?