When South Australia’s Country ire Service started to provide an RSS feed of incidents last week, I (along with many other SA geeks) immediately thought:

Map Mashup!

So, slightly hungover after a great New Year’s Eve celebration, I fired up Yahoo Pipes and set to.

It was a pretty straightforward task - strip the suburb name out of the feed title, append "South Australia" to help the location builder module and grab the output as KML. You can see the pipe here so feel free to make a copy and mess around with it.

Here is the finished map (RSS readers will need to click through to the story to view it)

Read the full text of this article...

I try to keep my political views out of this blog but with recent news that the Australian Government is to introduce mandatory internet filtering at the ISP level, I must add my voice to those that are crying out against this massive reduction of freedom of speech.

If you haven’t heard about the Australian Labour Party’s plans, they involve forcing all ISPs to implement a Chinese-style great firewall that will prevent access to domains and URLs that are listed on a secret list.

NoCleanFeed Elsewhere

A great deal of discussion has centred around this issue and I won’t go into why censorship is bad or why the plan is doomed to failure. Instead here are a bunch of links discussing (well, attacking) the Communications Minister’s position far more eloquently than I can:

• Cory Doctorow, on BoingBoing.net - Great Firewall of Australia will nationally block sites appearing on a secret, unaccountable list
• Duncan Riley of The Inquisitr - Australia Confirms Censorship Plans, Tells Fibs On The Filtering Trial
• Slashdot Geeks discuss the issue
• Even the Australian Government’s own report suggests that the filter can be easly bypassed

For more up-to-date commentary, see the No Clean Feed site from Electronic Frontiers Australia or even see the #nocleanfeed hashtag on twitter.

NoCleanFeed Censored Twitter

I’ve made a (admitedly frivolous) twitter toy to raise some awareness of this issue, that shows the #nocleanfeed twitter stream and Kevin Rudd’s tweets with random words blacked out - unless they contain some swearing.

I hope you enjoy it and it provokes some discussion, so please RT!

The NoCleanFeed Twitter Toy is here.

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Creative Commons licensed photo by Tarale.

If you want your web pages to create a buzz on social media, you need to make it easy for your visitors to submit your posts to their favourite social bookmarking sites. Adding some buttons at the bottom of each post is a great way to help your readers and give them a visual reminder to submit your content.

This is a list of icons representing social bookmarking sites that are free to use. Some are distributed under the terms of one of the Creative Commons licenses or other, similar, conditions so be sure to check the terms of the license and attribute the author where necessary:

Matte Blue And White Square Icons by Icons-Etc

Number of icons:	108
Link:	http://icons.mysitemyway.com/gallery/post/matte-blue-and-white-square-icons-social-media-logos/
License:	Free to use

Sweet Social Media Icons by Custom Icon Design

Number of icons:	35
Link:	http://www.customicondesign.com/free-icon/35-sweet-social-media-icons/
License:	Free for non-commercial use

Socialize Icons by DryIcons

Number of icons:	12
Link:	http://dryicons.com/free-icons/preview/socialize-icons-set/ & http://dryicons.com/free-icons/preview/socialize-part-2-icons-set
License:	Free with linkback

Circular Social Media Icons by Blog Perfume

Number of icons:	27
Link:	http://www.blogperfume.com/new-27-circular-social-media-icons-in-3-sizes/
License:	Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Social.me by jwloh

Number of icons:	30
Link:	http://jwloh.deviantart.com/art/Social-me-90694011
License:	Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Social Media Mini Icons by Koko Media

Number of icons:	30
Link:	http://www.komodomedia.com/blog/2008/12/social-media-mini-iconpack/
License:	Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Free Social Media Icons by WeFunction

Number of icons:	14
Link:	http://wefunction.com/2009/05/free-social-icons-app-icons/
License:	Free, with linkback

Social and Web Icons by Iconspedia

Number of icons:	57
Link:	http://www.iconspedia.com/pack/social-and-web-2282/
License:	Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License

Social Icons #4 by Tydlinka

Number of icons:	16
Link:	http://tydlinka.deviantart.com/art/Set-of-social-icons-no-4-110796162
License:	Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License

Pixel Perfect Social Media Icons by PsdTuts

Number of icons:	27
Link:	http://psd.tutsplus.com/freebies/icons/81-pixel-perfect-social-media-icons/
License:	Free for personal and commercial work, no attribution required

Polaroid Social Media Icons by WebToolkit4.me

Number of icons:	16
Link:	http://webtoolkit4.me/2009/03/17/polaroid-icon-set/
License:	Free for personal and commercial work, not for resale

Bevel Dark by Tutorial9

Number of icons:	10
Link:	http://www.tutorial9.net/resources/free-icon-pack-bevel-dark-social-icons/
License:	Free for personal and commercial work, not for resale

Pretty much all of these icons sets have made it into my delicious bookmarks so you can always join my network to keep abreast of any new finds that I make.

I hope I have correctly attributed the original authors (it can be a bit tricky with all the icon aggregators around). If you think I’ve made a mistake, then please leave a comment or contact me directly. Oh and, by the way, see those little social bookmarking icons at the bottom of this post? Please use them, thanks :-)

A while ago, Glenn Murray (aka DivineWrite) put out a call on Twitter looking for people to review his latest ebook, SEO Secrets.

Despite being hugely sceptical about the whole ebook genre (too many scammers charging for misleading or out of date information in that space, IMHO) I volunteered because I know that Glenn’s previous work is of a high quality and, as I follow him on delicious, I know he’s been doing a lot of very diligent research.

First Impressions

On downloading the PDF and opening my review copy for the first time I was struck by how nicely designed and well laid-out the book is. The title page matches the design of his website and the typography is unusally readable for a PDF. On to the coontents page to what topics it covers and... JEEZ! IT’S HUGE!. One hundred and ninety-nine pages long!

Sure, the layout uses plenty of whitespace and Glenn’s attention to detail means that he included a three-page introduction, glossary, bibliography and index but 199 pages makes for a long ebook.

The First Few Chapters

SEO is a very broad subject and Glenn has attempted to cover a lot of it. Experienced SEOs won’t gain any insight into cutting edge techniques or shady greyhat practices - this is a book for bloggers and web designers wanting to get to grips with the basics of search engine optimisation.

The first chapter explains what SEO means (I said it was for beginners) and why you would want to be aware of good practices in the art. After that, the next chapter covers keyword research and contains a number of good examples, often culled from divinewrite.com itself.

Glenn’s On-Page SEO Advice

Chapter three is a meaty one at thirty-four pages and covers the technical aspects of SEO, such as canonical URLs, duplicate content, semantic HTML and so on.

Everything presented here is solid, sensible advice - my experience is that if you follow these pointers, you’ll rank for keywords that aren’t too competitive. Glenn backs up his instructions with lots of links and examples making the book is all the more readable for it, if you want to dig deeper into a particular issue he provides some good pages to keep reading on the web.

Configuring Wordpress For SEO

The fourth chapter covers Glenn’s recipe for optimising a self-hosted Wordpress install and, again, it is good advice. I think, however, that this is the section of the book that will age fastest.

Wordpress is continually releasing new versions and its ecosystem of third-party plugins and themes is enormous. I think it is worth looking at the advice in the book and hunting around (or thinking laterally) for other ways to acheive similar ends. If every Wordpress blog installed the list of plugins in SEO Secrets, there would be no competitive advantage.

Chapter 5 - Submit Your Site(Map)

Nop surprises here: Glenn recommends submitting a sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Bing’s webmaster tools and to their Local Business Centres, where appropriate.

He also mentions the two remaining directories that have any search engine love - Yahoo and DMOZ. I personally don’t think that Yahoo directory is worth $200 per year, but your mileage may vary.

Create Great Content and Optimise It

This is DivineWrite’s core expertise - copywriting for SEO - and it shows in the next couple of chapters.

He starts with the oft repeated premise of create great content and people will link to it and then discusses in detail the types of posts that can act as linkbait (taking the 20 post types from Problogger’s book).

The next chapter builds on the keyword research from chapter one and discusses techniques to ensure that your articles are packed with good keywords whilst still keeping your text readable and feeling natural. This is good stuff, and something that I need to practice. I particularly like the use of wordclouds to illustrate keyword density.

After writing and optimising your content, the book then gives some pointers on creating a buzz around it with social media and some (very whitehat) linkbuilding strategies. I am not going to go into the details of the rest of the book - suffice to say it covers the full range of SEO basics.

Conclusion

I would recommend this ebook to those starting out in SEO. It is well-researched and informatively written and provides excellent value for money at $39.97 (USD). I know that Glenn put a lot of work into its production and it shows - this is not the typical twenty page, cut-and-paste ebook rip off.

If you are starting your first blog then a resource like this book will save you a lot of time trying to sift through misinformation and rubbish. The techniques presented here will work and provide a great foundation to your SEO campaign.

Want to get the download? Well, here it is.

If you want to check out the quality of Glenn’s work before you buy, here is his presentation on Content Creation For Search Engines:

Squidoo is great for building links to your websites and primary content, but your Squidoo lenses need links too. Many web 2.0 sites will allow you to build links on autopilot just by submitting an RSS feed - okay those links aren’t of a very high quality but every little helps, right?

So I was busy doing some Squidoo based linkbuilding for a wine education website and wanted to get some links to my lenses. I followed the usual protocols and left some relevant blog comments, submitted to a bunch of Squidoo directories and then looked to import the set of lenses into a lifestream for a few cheap, easy backlinks.

It turned out to be harder to find than it should be, so I figured I’d write it up here on the blog.

Squidoo do offer RSS feeds for syndication but it doesn’t seem to publicise the fact - and there is certainly no auto-discovery on your lensmaster dashboard (so no orange RSS icon in the browser’s address bar).

Anyway, the secret is to construct a URL like this:

http://www.squidoo.com/xml/syndicate_lensmaster/username/

Make sure to change username to your squidoo username.

The excellent SquidUtils can also give you seven different RSS feeds for your lenses if you enter your Squidoo username. Thanks to TheFluffaNutta for the tip.

Twitter users have been "retweeting" others for a while now, using functionality built into their desktop or web clients or sometimes just plain old Ctrl+C. Twitter sat up and took notice and decided to incorporate retweets into their application (and API).

However, they changed the nature of the retweet so that it is now much harder to understand just who is doing the retweeting. Instead of seeing RT @andymurd Hello world, the new Twitter retweet functionality simply puts the original into the stream of the retweeter.

The New Retweets Are Very Different

The functionality unveiled by Twitter fundamentally changes the nature of a retweet. The old retweets meant the retweeter was saying something like I endorse this message or I think this is cool/funny/useful/important. Who was doing the retweeting was very important - there was huge difference between a RT from your mum and one from @StephenFry.

The powers behind Twitter do realise that this is a big change, check out this quote from Evan Williams’ blog:

...I know the design of this feature will be somewhat controversial. People understandably have expectations of how the retweet function should work

In the rest of the post he explains that the new functionality was designed to address problems of attribution, redundancy/noise and trackability.

I agree that reducing redundant retweets is highly desirable - I don’t need to follow @Mashable any more because my other followers retweet every single thing he says! However, they’ve already taken steps to block duplicate tweets from a single user, surely this could be expanded to removing duplicate retweets from a user’s stream?

Trackability is a nice feature for application developers and data miners but does not directly affect the user experience. Third parties like TweetMeme have been approaching this problem with varying degrees of success.

Attributing Retweets

I don’t agree with Evan that there is a problem with attributing retweets. For those of us with busy tweet streams, seeing a trusted avatar is a valuable signal of quality.

Retweets are a good measure of the virality of an idea but it would be naive to think that some twitterers have a great deal more influence than others. When a twitter celebrity RTs your message, you receive an influx of followers and a flood of traffic to any links in your tweet.

New Retweets Are Not All Bad

It’s not the end of the world - the old retweeting method still works.

Most twitter clients have not yet caught up with the API changes for retweets, so their adoption has been slow. Together with an adverse reaction from many users, the old retweets look set to stay.

There is a simple solution for Twitter to backpedal out of this corner - rebrand their retweet functionality.

Choosing a new name would make users think of the changes as new functionality, not changes to an existing (and much loved) feature. So what to call it? My suggestion is cross-tweeting to reflect the crossing of twitter user streams that occurs when a tweet from a user that you don’t follow appears in your friends timeline.

What do you think? Perhaps you have a better name than cross-tweeting. Please leave a comment.

I noticed a post on Dom’s blog asking for suggestions on how to prevent exploits in user submitted HTML using PHP and thought that I’d post an in-depth response regarding the security practices that should be followed when designing and building a site that accepts UGC.

What Is UGC?

User generated content is at the heart of most web 2.0 sites, from Facebook to Delicious via Digg, Flickr and Twitter. All these sites generate loads of traffic from data that their userbase submits for free - which sounds like a great deal, until a malicious user discovers an exploit and suddenly the site is awash with viagra spam, malware and popups and then legitimate users soon leave.

UGC simply means anything that your users enter which is later displayed on your website.

This includes usernames, comments, email address, blog entries (if you run a blogging platform), tweets etc. Note that this data doesn’t have to come from a form served by your server - JSON, XML, RSS feeds and thirdy party adverts can all contain undesirable markup.

Types Of Exploits found In UGC

Exploits can take many forms but two of the most common are cross site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection, both of which can and should be prevented in server-side code.

Note that it is no use to simply rely on javascript to validate your forms in the user’s browser - not all users have javascript enabled and malicious users can bypass the browser altogether. Use server-side validation.

A Common XSS Attack

XSS attacks (almost) always involve the bad guys adding some javascript to your web application that will be executed on your users’ web browsers. This sort of vulnerability can be very damaging if your web application has a password protected area for users.

An example of an XSS exploit could be found on a social website (with features such as those found on Facebook or Bebo). A bad guy creates a profile and lists his homepage as:

javascript:alert("You have been infected with a virus. Visit www.crappyav.info to remove it!"); return false;

Then the bad guy runs a script that befriends every user he can find. Many of them will click on his homepage URL to see what he is all about. When they do, they’ll see an alert box like this:

More inventive attackers could use the exploit to automate friend messages, send spam, show viagra adverts or even scrape sensitive data. All of which are very damaging for the site’s reputation and mean that the owner will be busy cleaning up for a long time.

Typical SQL Injection Attacks

Most UGC is stored in a relational database such as MySql. SQL injection attacks exploit lazy (or naiive) programmers that build up strings of SQL to send to the database containing the raw data supplied, such as this example that searches for a user with the supplied name:

$sql = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = '" . $_POST['username'] . "'";

This will create a simple SQL select statement, like this (if I supply the username andy):

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = 'andy'

A piece of working SQL, but it is vulnerable. An attacker might enter a username like '; DELETE FROM users; --. Which would result in the following SQL being created:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ''; DELETE FROM users; --';

Readers familiar with SQL should now be experiencing a deep sense of dread (and possibly awe at the inventiveness of some people). The SQL code would delete every single entry from the users table if were executed, even though the author thought he was writing a read-only SELECT statement. Scary stuff!

Preventing SQL Injection Attacks

Preventing attacks like the SQL injection outlined above is quite straightforward, if you use a feature common almost all RDBMS clients - use prepared statements with bind variables.

Using bind variables would mean that the SQL would change to:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ?

NB: The actual syntax of bind variables can vary between RDBMS platforms

So, whatever strings you provide to the database will behave just as you expect - they cannot be interpreted as SQL. There are significant performance benefits too.

Guarding Against Cross Site Scripting Attacks

There is no simple action to prevent XSS attacks - you must analyse all possible user inputs and determine how they must be sanitised.

Regular expressions can help determine if a user supplies invalid data but don’t just rely on regexps, specify minimum and maximum lengths too. Determine what format the user-supplied data will take is vital to perform further content specific checks.

Plain Text Input

Usernames and status updates usually take the form of plain text, but you will need to only allow a restricted character set (don’t forget that hackers can send a string of backspace or escape characters).

Other issues to consider for plain text input are:

• Is the data case sensitive?
• Internationalisation - will you support accented characters, or even non-latin characters sets?
• Will a username be used to create a URL, as Twitter does?
• Is the data displayed publicly? If so, it would be best to prevent people from using their email address as their username.

Remember to output your strings with correct HTML encoding. See PHP’s htmlentities(), Perl’s CGI module, the Ruby cgi escape etc.

URL Input

It is common for social sites and blogs to allow members or commenters to link to their homepage. In this case, you probably want to restrict the protocol of the URL to just HTTP and HTTPS (definitely not javascript:).

Consider very carefully whether you should nofollow the links - if you don’t endorse the page, or it might be an affiliate link then you should.

You also need to have a blacklist of disallowed domains which should include most common URL shorteners. URL shorteners can be abused (get a list of them here).

Other domains are often targets for spammers, so make sure that your list can be easily edited. You might want to consider using regular expressions here too, so that you could (for example) block *.blogspot.com.

Another check that your legitimate users will find reassuring, is to check the URL against Google’s safe browsing API.

File or Image Upload

If you allow users to upload their own avatars to your site you need to check them thoroughly. Only allow files in known formats, and check the MIME Type not the file extension.

While not strictly an XSS issue, multimedia files have been hacked before to cause buffer overruns so ensure that you keep your server packages up to date with the latest patches.

Ensure that images are within specified size parameters or resize them on the server (to prevent page widening).

HTML Input

Sanitising HTML input is a more complex process than other types of input, since HTML often contains unclosed tags, implicit attributes and general hackery.

Most HTML sanitisation methods involve building a parse tree from the input and traversing the tree to discard any elements and attributes that are deemed undesirable. Define a whitelist of allowed element/atttribute combinations NOT a blacklist.

Take extra care in preventing attributes like ONCLICK and ONMOUSEOVER in all HTML elements. Beware of the STYLE attribute too.

For most HTML user generated content, the only element that should be allowed an attribute is the <A> (anchor) element, and the only attribute that it is allowed is HREF (in some circumstances you might allow <IMG> with SRC and ALT). Take care with the URLs supplied to HREF and SRC attributes, see the section above on URL input for validation recommendations.

Look for HTML sanitizers for your preferred language - lots of other coders will have solved this problem before.

Checking for spam is also useful when accepting user supplied HTML content. Automattic’s Akismet has a great API and good third-party library support to help you out with this.

RSS Import

If you allow users import an RSS feed from an untrusted domain, you need to do more that just validate it against the XML Schema Definition. You need to treat titles as plain text, descriptions as HTML and links as URLs as discussed elsewhere in this post.

Other Precautions

Aside from the XSS and SQL injection issues, there are a number of other sensible precautions that web application developers can take to minimise the impact off malicious users. You might think that these won’t affect you soon, but my advice is to get them in place before you need them. If your site comes under sustained attack, you’ll have plenty on your plate without needing to code and test some defenses.

IP Blacklist

Recording and testing against a set of IP addresses that are banned from your application is an excellent precaution and will deter many script kiddies and wannabe blackhats. Place the check early in your application code to reduce server load.

More sophisticated systems could use a variety of inputs (length of membership, country, IP address, number of previous posts, etc) together with a binary classifier to determine whether a user action is undesirable.

Rate Limiting

Scripts can type a lot faster than humans, so any user posting updates many times per second is likely to have an evil intent. You can modify your session management code to slow and eventually lock out such abuse.

DDOS Protection

Talk to your hosting company about this (there are specialist consultants that can help you with this too).

Backups

This really goes without saying - get your backup strategy sorted out now and test it regularly! Then test it again.

Sensible, Helpful Error Messages

Remember that the vast majority of your users will have good intentions. They might mis-type an email or not understand exactly what is a URL, so provide useful feedack when displaying an error message.

Use simple language and be very clear about just what is and isn’t allowed in each field.

This Is Lots Of Work

Yes it is and it’s worth it. Taking solid, sensible precautions like these make the difference between throwing something together and engineering.

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You might also like:

• REST web services tutorial
• The Same Origin Policy and JSON Callbacks

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Creative Commons licensed photo by Tancread.

A few weeks ago, I got a DM from Justin Vincent asking me for feedback on his latest project - TweetMiner. I’ve been trying it on and off for a while now and I must say that I’m impressed - it’s a solid piece of work that knows its target users.

What Is TweetMiner?

Available as an Adobe AIR application as well as a traditional web app, TweetMiner provides a dashboard for one or more twitter accounts. Each account has a set of streams associiated with it - by default you get the usual tweets from your friends, mentions, direct messages etc. You can add streams from individual users and/or twitter searches.

Each Twitter account can post an update immediately or schedule one for the future including the ability to add them to a “recurring schedule” (more on this below).

As well as the Twitter streams, you can add RSS feeds but this is no feed reader to rival Google Reader or NewsGator. The feed entries can be instantly tweeted or scheduled and you get to edit the message before it is sent, unlike Google Reader’s Send To feature.

TweetMiner’s Recurring Schedule

The recurring schedule is designed to prevent users from flooding their Twitter stream with updates when they find a rich seam of new information that they want to share.

You can configure the schedule to post queued tweets every few minutes and (optionally restrict it to between certain hours) for example every thirty minutes between 8am and 7pm.

TweetMiner Is For Power Users

After just a few minutes of using TweetMiner, it quickly becomes obvious that the tool is aimed squarely at Twitter’s power user community - the so-called social media gurus.

The real-time web loves breaking news and integrating RSS feeds with Twitter is a common strategy amongst those wanting to build followers. That is not to say that TweetMiner is for bots and spammers - feed entries are not mindlessly tweeted, instead the user must choose the items to tweet and can edit the text before sending.

TweetMiner is monetised via a Freemium pricing model that means users must pay to user large numbers of twitter accounts, scheduled messages or track their links via bit.ly. All these features will appeal to marketers looking to leverage Twitter and connect with large numbers of people.

It’s Not Perfect

It’s still early days for TweetMiner, but since Justin asked for my feedback I’ll list a few comments here:

• The page layout does not make great use of the limited screen real-estate on my Linux netbook.
• I’d like to see my RSS feeds merged into one stream - not an issue with just five streams but with many hundreds of potential news sources that would affect user experience.
• I’m not sure what advantage the Adobe AIR version brings? Using TweetMiner offline doesn’t make much sense to me - perhaps Justin could give us an answer in the comments.
• The "Please Upgrade to Firefox 3.5" dialog on every page is pretty annoying. After closing this once, I’d like to see it revert to a ribbon across the top of the page.

Not too many complaints there - I like Twetminer a lot and think it is definitely on track to become a very powerful tool. Oh, and I’d really, really like to see an API released for it too.

So I do recommend that you check TweetMiner out and I’ll be following its progress with interest (and using it to post to Twitter from time to time). You can sign up using the link below:

Finding Breaking News To Post To Twitter

Of course, you need to find some good sources of breaking news to get the most out of TweetMiner - preferrably sources that few other people use. So instead oof just tweeting the latest posts from TechCrunch or Mashable (good though both those blogs are), try thinking creatively to find interesting content.

Here are some of my tips for building a network of great sources of new and diverse content:

The Old Guard

Many of the first generation of social websites are still going very strong, with loyal, intelligent users that like to discuss the issues of the day in great detail. Sites like Slashdot, MetaFilter (and its simian sibling) are still great. Whilst K5 is good for US politics and B3ta is great for peurile British humour.

Google Trends & Alerts

Both Google Trends and Google Alerts can provide RSS feeds, allowing you to find out what people are searching for and be notified whenever a new blog post covers an area that you are interested in.

Feeds Of Search Results

Both Bing and Yahoo provide feeds of their search results so grab a few for some narrow keywords and plug them into TweetMiner.

Google doesn’t like to release its SERPs via RSS, but luckily there is

Smaller Social Sites

There are loads of niche social bookmarking sites out there if you look beyond Digg and Reddit. Places like Kirtsy, Mister wong and Twine have gold in their upcoming story sections. You can also check out this long list of niche social media sites on Traffikd.

Delicious Tags & Networks

I rave about how useful delicious.com is all the time and I am constantly amazed at how few people use it to its full potential.

Build a great Delicious network or grab an RSS feed from a number of tags and plug it into TweetMiner to find those gems that people will want to read again later. You could always add me to your delicious network too!

Do you know of any other great but unsung sources of breaking news of interesting content? Let me know in the comments.

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Creative Commons licensed photo by cobalt123.

Any SEO worthy of the title will have heard about David Harry’s SEO Dojo by now. The dojo is a knowledgebase, forum and community hub for SEOs, information retrieval geeks, social media maniacs, link buiders and more that places a heavy emphasis on education and information exchange.

I was lucky enough to get a membership when the site was still in its beta phase and I’ve been astounded by the quality of information available and as the community grew, I was blown away by the helpfulness of the other members.

Remember, I’m not an SEO (I just do some SEO from time to time) but the dojo’s members are just as happy to answer confused noobie questions from people like me as they are discussing page segmentation patents.

It’s Not Just About The Forums

David and the community hand pick the best tools, patent publications, webmaster videos and research papers relating to information retrieval and (by extension) SEO. The result is a single source of high quality search-related news and ideas in one place - kind of like Sphinn’s hot topics but without the sock puppets and manufactured controversy.

You can spend hours in the SEO dojo’s library, diving deeper and deeper into different aspects of search technology - and I often do.

Even if you don’t join the dojo, sign up for the newsletter to get the latest sent to your inbox - you’ll miss out on the great discussion that goes with it though.

SEO Downloads

There is some great unique content available to dojo members - David’s SEO handbook e-books (including the linkbuilders edition, well worth a read) and Excel worksheets for linkbuilders and directory submitters.

The big draw, however, is the amazing SEO site audit framework. You know that document template that you always meant to write covering the basics to look for when first analysing a site (or a competitor)? This is it.

Eight pages of solid SEO wisdom that will ensure that you don’t forget any detail. It is constantly being updated, too, so it won’t become obelete as technologies change.

Weekly Chats Too

You can get involved in the discussion in real-time by chatting via Skype. These great sessions are used to answer questions, build resources and just chew the fat.

What Are You Waiting For - Get 30% Off!

If you weren’t as lucky as me and missed out on the beta period, you will want to join the dojo but it’s now a paid resource.

There are monthly, three month, six month and twelve month plans available, starting at 30 bucks for one month. The longer you sign up for, the more you save and the 6 and twelve month plans get loads of valuable freebies thrown in.

On top of all that, use the coupon code dojofriends to get a massive 30% off your sign-up!

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There are no affiliate links in this post and I don’t make any money from it. I wholeheartedly endorse the SEO and think that it is a top notch resource. My only connection with the Huomah SEO Dojo is that I’m a satisfied member.

You can find me on the Dojo with the username andymurd - say hello!

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More posts on SEO:

• Twitter Link Building
• SEO For Internet Applications

I’ve been experimenting with the Conduit toolbar system and come up with what I think is a useful offering (and I’ve been impressed with Conduit’s product in the process).

The MMMeeja toolbar works on Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Safari and on Windows, Mac or Linux. Like most browser toolbars, it adds a horizontal menu of extra functionality across the top of your browser pane.

Functionality Offered By The Toolbar

All Conduit toolbars come with a Google search box built-in, as the Conduit company make money via an advertising revenue sharing deal with Google, but the rest of the toolbar is completely customisable by the creator. The tools that I chose to add are:

• A feed of the latest posts from this blog (got to have some self-promotion!)
• A ShareThis button, allowing you to quickly and easily share pages with a huge variety of social networks. Supported networks include:
  • Digg
  • Delicious.com
  • Reddit
  • Yahoo Buzz
  • Stumbleupon
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • And loads more
• A gadgets menu that allows you to jot down quick notes as you surf. You can also customise your toolbar installation by adding more gadgets (there is a large range to choose from.
• A domainers menu that provides quick and easy access to whois, DNS, ping and keyword lookups.
• An SEO toolbar that can display the Alexa data, Google pagerank, Google/Yahoo/Bing indexed pages, backlinks etc for the current page.

Hopefully, readers of this blog will find the toolbar useful. Let me know via the comments if you have any suggestions for more tools.

Download The Toolbar

You can download our toolbar by clicking on this button:

Make Your Own Toolbar With Conduit

I found the whole process to be pretty easy and intuitive, although I haven’t tried building any custom applications or gadgets yet (again, any suggestions are welcome).

If you need a little help getting started, try searching YouTube as there are lots of screencasts and howto videos on there. Here is one of the better ones: