If you don’t already know, the prime purpose of SquidUtils is to provide tools and utilities for Lensmasters. You can get a summary of what’s on offer here by reading the post Welcome to SquidUtils, and then come back here to catch up with what’s new.

In recent weeks, I have been building some new tools, and they range from the useful, through kinda nifty, to simply awesome. It wasn’t until today I realised how many I had ’sitting on the shelf’, so I thought I should get them out for Lensmasters to try.

Health-Check: This was mentioned at the end of my previous post, where I talked about large percentage of lenses that were not optimised for their keywords. The Lens Health-Check Tool will automatically assess your lens, and give advice on where you could improve it. It is still technically in Beta, and there is some functionality yet to be programmed into to it, but I wanted people to be able to benefit from it.

Amazon RSS Feeds: This is actually an old tool, which is was a little tricky to use unless you’re already an expert with Amazon’s affiliate program. It basically allows you to dynamically embed Amazon products directly into your lens, selected by Category, Listmania or ASIN. Finding the ‘browse node’ ids for a particular category was never easy, but the Amazon Feed Generator now has an integral node browser, that lets you drill down to the one you need.

But that’s not all of them - there’s more…

Show Off Your Fanclub: When other Lensmasters visit your profile, they have the opportunity to join your ‘Fanclub’. If you look down the right hand side of your profile, you can in fact see the mug shots of all your fans. These Lensmasters will then receive any SquidCasts that you send out, via the ‘My Favourites‘ tab on their dashboard.

Now, you can proudly display how many fans you have, with this funky widget. Get your own from the Lensmaster Feeds page.
Ideal for putting on your Lensography or blog.

Table Generator: The <table> and associated tags are not permitted on Squidoo, and if you attempt to put these into your lens, they will get stripped out. The Table Generator with convert CSV data or a HTML table into code that is compatible, and looks just as good (maybe even better). It is not quite finished yet, but it does have the core functionality. If there’s anything you would like me to add to this tool, please let me know.

Firefox Addon: I have saved the best until last… Squidoo Enhanced is an addon script for Firefox that improves the lens workshop, and also some of the other dashboard pages. The main benefits include: full width workshop, larger text entry boxes, advanced tag editor and links to lens optimisation tools. The main dashboard has links to SquidUtils, and the ‘My Groups’ tab is much improved. For more full details on what it does, and how to install it, visit this page.

Bonus Script: If you’re a regular on the forums at SquidU.com, you will appreciate this bonus addon I created for it: Cleaner SquidU removes the forum rules from non-index pages, and all of your own threads, posts and quotes are highlighted.

And the most wonderful thing about these tools, and something I think is rather incredible, they are all completely free! (If you would like to support SquidUtils, then there is a Donation button on the main page).

Have Fun! :o)

thefluffanutta