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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Here’s the deal: Twitter has posted a bunch of new job openings, four of which focus on monetization. Twitter is almost four years old, is well established in the popular consciousness, has a few zillion users, and is now thinking about monetization.

To be fair to Twitter, I’m sure they’ve been thinking about monetization for a while, but haven’t really done anything about it. In fact, lots of people have wondered if Twitter can be monetized. Nobody is going to pay to post 140 character tweets. They could toss ads on your Twitter home page — maybe a banner at the top and a smaller block in the sidebar — but whether that could pay for their expensive infrastructure is unclear. Plenty of people use adblockers and others read tweets in other ways thanks to the Twitter API.

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BlueHost seems to have overcome the pre-holiday blahs that dumped it down to sixth place in November. HostGator and HostMonster (BlueHost’s alter ego) slid in just behind it, with DreamHost sliding several of spots to fourth. For the first time in a number of months, the top four hosts make some sense. JustHost stayed in the top five because it is cheap and not bad.

On the downside, midPhase and its sister site ANHosting slid further down the list. Ever since the UK2 buyout, their reputation for decent service and support has been crumbling away and the word of mouth is hurting them. I still think they are better than any of Endurance’s cavalcade of offerings, but new hosting customers may not agree.

It’s a new year and 2010 is off to a blustery start here in Pittsburgh. Happy hosting and bundle up.