Chris Anderson and Wired have put together a blog for geek dads, offering several project ideas you can do with your kids. You can even submit your own.

Happy Sunday.

Kayla is my ten year old daughter, and she’s working on her web strategy.

Way back when Kayla was eight, she invented a character named Fat Boy and wrote a story about him. We scanned and converted the story into a PDF, and it has since been mailed and emailed all over the country and getting rave reviews. The response inspired Kayla to try to get published.

Thanks to some great publishing advice from Megan, Kayla wants to build an audience of new Fat Boy fans while she works on her book and decided creating a web site was the way to go.

So, Kayla listed her ideas and goals on her whiteboard a couple of nights ago, with no help or influence. It was one of those proud parent moments in our house (whiteboarding, to do lists, user experience, loving your job, testing!)

I thought I had a lot to teach Kayla, and she ended up teaching me a thing or two. I’m going to try her lunch tip (#4, second list), soon.

Kayla’s lists, with permission from the author:

Web Site Solutions

1. Make sections that say “Books by Me”, “Games”, “Drawing”, “Store”, “Home Page” or more!
2. Organize web site
3. Try to make it like it is your job
4. Come up with at least 4 new Fat Boy stories
5. Work hard
6. After the web site is done, see if it looks okay when you go on
7. Tell your friends to tell their friends about my web site before and after it is launched
8. Try to make so many books by yourself that there can be a whole book store full of ‘em
9. Buy a Fat Boy store so people can get their books signed
10. Try to make Fat Boy games so popular that you can put it on TV, and make it into a TV show too!

Plans to make it fun!

1. Have a launch party at the end!
2. Draw and color pictures in book
3. Get teddy bears involved
4. Try to have a long, fun lunch break
5. Try to put a little clip that shows people how to draw Fat Boy
6. Have fun with it too!
7. Try to make the stories better. Try to make Fat Boy look better too
8. Try to make the web site so fun that people won’t want to get off!
9. Keep adding more games onto the web site to make it extra fun!
10. Try to come up with new games when each holiday comes by and keep the games there even if the holiday has passed.

You can visit the Fat Boy web site, but Kayla asked me to mention this is the just a basic starting point. Thankfully, she never learned the “Coming Soon” thing.

Last night, Squidoo won the SXSW Web Award for best community. It was a deer-in-the-headlights moment for me, because I’m not one for public speaking, and because you just can’t out-funny the host, zefrank (and funny is what I try to fall back on in these situations). Thankfully, Gil was there too and did a great job accepting the award for us.

So now that the spotlights are off, the auditorium is empty, and zefrank is back in the ipod, here’s what I’d like to say:

It didn’t feel right to be on stage without Seth, Megan, Jill and Heath. We’re a tiny team, and we wouldn’t be where we are without any one of them.

This award belongs to our lensmasters. Big time. After all, this was for best community, and the lensmasters are the ones creating the great lenses and spreading the word. They amaze us all the time.

Our platform exists thanks to our development partner, Viget Labs. We were lucky to have Ben, Bryan and Thanny as part of the team to get us on the web.

And thanks to the great folks at SXSW, too. They selected us as finalists and took good care of us at the awards ceremony.

Heh, that was a lot easier than last night.

I sometimes have a hard time keeping up with all the great work Jill is doing at Squidoo. Today I found out that two of my passions (Squidoo and helping in New Orleans) came together in a really neat way:

We wanted to pass on a heartwarming thank-you note from Rebecca Besch, a 6th-grade teacher in Slidell, Louisiana. In Rebecca’s class, most students lost their computers (and in fact their entire homes) in Hurricane Katrina. But last month, due to the generosity of Squidoo lensmasters, we were able to give Rebecca approximately $1,200 from the Squidoo Charity Fund to purchase two new computers for her classroom via the nonprofit DonorsChoose.

There are hundreds more public-school teachers’ projects available for funding at DonorsChoose.org. And remember, you can always donate your Squidoo royalties to DonorsChoose, too.

From the Squid Blog.