The following is a list of Twitter oriented websites which provide services to enhance the Twitter experience.

• Twellow is a Twitter directory, and in my opinion it’s one of the best, if not the best Twitter directory on the web. Users can add them selves to up to three different categories, and Twellow actually searches the content of user profiles allowing you to search all users or with in different categories, making it the best Twitter directory I’ve encountered thus far.
• Twitpic seems to have become the de facto standard for sharing images on Twitter. With support built into various Twitter clients that allow you to view Twitpics within the client window.
• Twitter Karma is a site which allows you to see who’s following you, who you’re following, and which of your followers are mutual. Upon viewing your three categories of relationships with other Twitter users you can decided which users you want to follow, unfollow, or block.
• What the Trend is a site with blurbs from users explaining why cretin topics are trending.
• Who the Tweet gives you an automated synopsis of what the given user name tweets about. I had a little trouble with it the first time around ( it said I didn’t exist) but after resubmitting my search it gave what I though to be a fairly accurate list of topics that I tweet about.
• Twitterholic is a site which ranks Twitter users by number of followers, and lets you view rankings site wide or by location.
• TwitChuck and TwitBlock are two very similar services which rate user accounts for levels of sparseness, they look for signs of automation, how often a person tweets, interaction with other users, and other factors.
• Twitvid is a site for sharing videos on Twitter.
• TwitterVision is a world map that displays pop up tweets in from the Twitter public time line in real time.

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Search engine optimization is the practice of creating search engine friendly web pages with relative content that can be easily searched and indexed. Search engine optimization is usually done with the intention of increasing the amount of traffic to a web site and is a big part of internet marketing.

The following is a simple list of things you can do to improve the search engine optimization of pages on your web site

A simple SEO checklist

• Semantic Markup: Be sure your pages are well structured. A title tag is probably the single most important tag on a page in respect to search engine optimization, other important tags include heading tags, paragraph tags, strong tags, and emphasis tags. These tags should be used where appropriate and should contain key word which accurately describe the content of your page.
• Meta Tags: Although not as important as they once where in respect to Search Engine Optimization meta tags are still relevant and should be used. The description meta tag for example is used by many search engines to allow site publishers to display a short description of pages in their own words within search results.
  <meta name="description" content="A cool web site about web design" />
  and the no follow meta tag can be used to tell search engines that a page should not be indexed.
  <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
  Click here for more information about meta tags.
• Site Map: A sitemap.xml file properly formatted and placed in the root directory of your site can be used to let search engines quickly index all of the pages on your site, inform them of which pages are most important, and how often certain pages are updated. XML-Sitemaps.com has a free tool you can use to instantly generate a site map for any site you chose. The free version has some limitations
• Internal Linking: Aside from your main navigation using contextual links in the content of your site which accurately describe the page they are linking to can be very beneficial in search engine optimization. Consider the following link for example: Web Design Portfolio.
• Keyword Density: Intelligently using words which describe your page or site as often as possible while maintaining usefulness and readability. Is a good way to let search engines know what your site is all about and what words should be used to find it. Key word density also ties in to semantic markup because keywords used in tags like the title tag, and heading tags have greater bearing on search engine results.
• URL Keywords: Last but not least, another factor used in determining your pages relevancy by search engines are keywords in the URL. Rather they be a file name such as web-design.html or part of the file path like /web/design/ incorporating a keyword or to into your domain is a big factor in this step as well.

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Anyone old enough to understand basic finances knows that the economy and the job market have been pretty crappy in recent years, so I wrote this post in hopes that it might  help anyone currently facing the burden of unemployment.

You need a resume and cover letter. To start off any job search you’ll need a good resume and cover letter, if your not exactly sure how to write one or if your current resume need some polishing I recommend checking out jobsearch.about.com this site has sample cover letter and resumes which you can uses as a reference to get you started. Alison Doyle also shares lots of other information and resources to aid job seekers.

Have some free software. If you’re going to be working on your resume you’ll need a good word processor / office suite, if you don’t already have Microsoft word I’d recommend downloading OpenOffice. The GO-OO branch of the open source software can open and save in the same formats used by MS Office, which includes the 2007 XML formats (docx) .

You need an email address. In order to start applying to jobs and sending out resumes its essential to have an email address which is professional in appearance, addresses like ladysman217 or sexylady82 don’t tend to go over well with most reputable employers. Here are examples of typical email address formats: first.last@domain.com, firstlast@domain.com, f.last@domain.com, flast@domain.com, I’m sure you get the idea. I think a domain form any major email service provider such as Live/Hotmail, Yahoo, or Google will do but I recommend getting a Google / Gmail account simply because it allows pop and imap access so you can use it with a desktop email client like ThunderBird or MS Outlook if you choose to, having a gmail account also gives you access to Google calendar which can be synced using the same email software I just mentioned.
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There are different reasons to use excerpts instead of full content in your rss feeds, Such as discouraging sploggers from stealing your content, and encouraging feed subscribers to visit your site. A drawback of this though is that WordPress by default only uses the first 55 words of your post in an excerpt minus any image or other media files you may have included in your post. One way around this is to enter your own custom excerpt into the excerpt field of your post editor while in HTML mode. Another method which I’m now using automatically adds the first image in your post (or a default image you specify if there is no image in your post) to your rss content, involves a function I found at Live Experience . Simply add the following code to your wp-includes/functions.php file:

function get_first_image() {
global $post, $posts;
$first_img = '';
ob_start();
ob_end_clean();
$output = preg_match_all('//i', $post->post_content, $matches);
$first_img = $matches [1] [0];
if(empty($first_img)){
//Defines a default image
$first_img ="http://yoursite.com/image.png";
}
return $first_img;
}

Then open up wp-includes/feed-rss2.php or the file name that corresponds to which ever feed format you’re using, next find each instance of the following line of code

<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>

and append the following to the front of it:

<?php echo '<img src="'.get_first_image().'" alt="" >' ?>

That’s all there is to it, if you’ve done everything right you should now automatically have images in your feeds, if you use a them which uses excerpts I’m sure you can think of at least one other way to use this function as well .

Update: The steps above involve editing some of the WordPress core files. The main problem with this is that you lose your changes whenever you update WordPress. A slightly modified and easier way is to simply place the following code into your themes functions.php file.

<?php
function get_first_image($content) {
global $post, $posts;
$first_img = '';
ob_start();
ob_end_clean();
$output = preg_match_all('/<img.+src=[\'"]([^\'"]+)[\'"].*>/i', $post->post_content, $matches);
$first_img = $matches [1] [0];
if(empty($first_img)){
//Defines a default image
$first_img ="http://yoursite.com/image.png";
}
return '<img src="'.$first_img.'" /><br />'.$content;
}
add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'get_first_image');
?>

If you should receive a php headers error, check to make sure there are no spaces or empty lines between any of the php code blocks in your functions.php file