BlueHost and HostMonster continue to be solid in the top three, with HostMonster actually grabbing number 1 this month. More impressive though is JustHost’s continued rise, now up to number 2. While JustHost may not be the ideal host for everyone, their price is a strong draw. DreamHost, last month’s top host, is back to number 4, while waning stalwart midPhase pushed back up to number 5.

What is more interesting, if somewhat inexplicable, if HostGator’s continued decline. An excellent host in its prime is tumbling without any clear cause. Price may be part of it, but DreamHost is the same price and is not suffering similarly. Ah, well, perhaps March will make this clearer.

Until then, be careful out there and happy hosting!

DreamHost bounced back to the top, but the siblings BlueHost and HostMonster held on nicely to numbers 2 and 3. JustHost has snuck ahead of HostGator again, suggesting that price is perhaps a more dominating factor in these trying economic times. In the lower half of the top ten, we have a bit more movement, with Yahoo tanking down to 10 and midPhase moving back to 6, but it remains to be seen if either is indicative of a longer trend.

I should acknowledge that this list is terribly late. The tardiness is somewhat due to the wretched weather here in Pittsburgh (and another 8 inches is due before tomorrow night), but also me allowing myself to take my eye off the ball. My apologies.

Happy Hosting, folks. Stay warm.

If you are a programmer or a web developer, you deal with code. It is part and parcel of the job. And a time may come when you want to share some of it with your readers by putting it in a post. Perhaps your are showing a social ranking algorithm written in Python. Maybe you are demonstrating an HTML idiom. You could even be writing something as unusual as a PHP or WordPress tutorial! In any one of these cases, you want an easy way to display the code.

Of course, there is one very simple way. Just paste it into the visual editor (not the HTML editor) and it will do any necessary conversion of angle brackets, ampersands, etc. into HTML entities. If WordPress thinks it is HTML code, it will even wrap it in pre tags for you. Observe:

<div id="search">
  <form id="searchform" method="GET" action="/index.php">
    <input type="text" name="s" id="s" size="16"  class="inputtext" />
    <input type="submit" value="Search" class="button" />
  </form>
</div>

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You know how some books have little quasi-relevant quotes at the start of each chapter? They are called chapter quotes and then can be a nice addition to some posts. Let’s see how we can do this easily in WordPress.

Of course, we could just toss the quote and relevant markup in the top of our post body. This would work, but is not the best method. The biggest problem is that the quote will appear on any page that includes an excerpt from our post. This means it will might there on the home page, the category page, the archive page, the tag pages, search results, and even in your RSS feeds! No matter how cool or appropriate the quote is, we would probably rather show off a bit of our text instead, no?

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