I have to confess that I have not yet done what is advocated in my title.  I ought to do so, and have been reminded about it by an excellent blog post entitled “Year in Review Article Template” by Chris Knight of EzineArticles.com.

To supplement that article I looked around on the web and found a few different examples of recent Year in Review writing.  Here are four, including a narrative report, a video review, a simple list and even a spreadsheet format. Between them they may give some ideas.

Commercial Open Source Blog: Another Year in Review

Commercial Open Source blog few days ago has completed another year of life, a good excuse to make another write-up about the past year. Over 300 posts covered many open source related to.

Wrecked Magazine – A Drifting Magazine featuring Formula D, D1GP …

Scion Racing 2009 Year in Review. The 2009 Scion Racing team video has quite a few drifting highlights from their respected stars Ken Gushi and Tanner Foust. The video is mixed with some other Scion assets but the bulk of the video …

Josh Ellingson Illustrator – Battle Damage – 2009 Year in Review

2009 Year in Review. Holy smokes, it’s almost 2010! It’s been a very interesting year, and about a million things happened. Here’s a meager rundown of all the trouble I got into this past year: My artwork went to SPACE! …

Data Breaches in 2009 – a year in review | Assassin's Blog

Announced Where the Data Breach Occurred Details of Breach Amount of Stolen Records October 28, 2009 Bank of New York Mellon Corp.

What will my own review look like? Watch this space!

I have several lenses (pages) on Squidoo.  Some of them I’m not particularly proud of because I have not given them enough attention, especially having been away from my normal work due to illness for most of this year.  Others, however, I feel quite content to claim are unique and useful pages (to use their description of what they say they’re looking for).  My pages provide good quality content, researched and written personally by myself and with plenty of outside links to help readers find further information.

But there’s the problem. Outside links! Squidoo in their assumed wisdom have put a limit of nine links to the same domain.  This gives me a problem in three respects.

Let’s take just one of my lenses, the one about Beatrix Potter the children’s author.

1. Beatrix Potter wrote a lot of books, and there have also been many books written about her.  Now I also happen to own an online bookshop so obviously I want to direct people to it.  The Squids have no objection to selling books.  It’s just that I’m probably going to have to change to directing people to Amazon because that’s a domain which they’ve whitelisted. Commercial bias?
2. Beatrix Potter was an early supporter of the leading British landscape protection body, The National Trust, and indeed spent a considerable proportion of the income from her writing to buy up at-risk land, especially in the Lake District, and hand it over to the Trust for the benefit of future generations. In a lengthening Squidoo lens I now have think carefully before creating another link between Miss Potter and the Trust in case the whole lens is banned by the Squid-police.
3. Finally, most of my links (to whatever external site) were passed through my tracking system. I’ve had to stop tracking in order to keep the lens live.

I can only assume that Squidoo only want small amateurish lenses and prefer not to have serious, professional web people involved with them.  Will I abandon all my lenses?  Probably not.  I can see that the content of one or two may have to be moved to somewhere else, probably onto new blogs of my own and just a small proportion left for the sake of a presence.  It’s most unlikely that I’ll be starting any more.  Is this what they really want?

- David Murray -

I didn’t jump on the BlogRush train when it left the station a year or so ago. Maybe that was a mistake because it was a great idea. However, today John Reese pulled the plug on this service after experiencing insoluble technical difficulties over many months. A shame really, but the right thing to do in the circumstances.

More about this at John Chow dot Com.

After working hard on my new AdMastery.biz advertising suite for several weeks I had expected to be able to release the first two modules today.

A principle that I established for myself from the start of this development was that I would not be pressed into launching it until I felt that it was genuinely ready. All major aspects of the site now work well. They’ve been tested and tested and re-tested! However, there are just a few minor glitches here and there which although they’re not serious could be irritating to users, so I’m holding off for another couple of days.

I currently have FIVE modules in planning. Later this week I plan to release the first two.

So if I’m going to hit that target I’d better get back to work ……

Wishing you success,

- David Murray -

ps. Meanwhile, have you read these important books yet?