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: