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.

It is a new year and I hope to make it a better one. With that in mind, here are a few of the things I hope to accomplish in 2010. Not all are directly relevant to web development, but so be it.

1. Post More Often

   Look! The least original resolution in the age of blogging! Even so. There are many times I think of something that would make a good post and never get around to writing it. Sometimes other things come up. Other times, someone else has written something similar and I don’t want to be redundant. But much of the time, I get distracted and either forget the idea entirely or wait too long and the moment passes.

   Not every post has to be a winner and certainly most of mine are not, but as the misquotation goes “Let a thousand flowers bloom.” If I put more of my ideas into writing and write more often, several things should happen. First, the occasional winning idea is more likely to make it past my fingertips and onto this or another site. Second, my writing muscles should become more limber. Writing begets writing and makes each successive piece easier to put into words. Third, I hope this will help me find more of a voice on this site. This has long been a problem for me. I am not a particularly formal person. In fact, I am probably a bit too casual. Unfortunately, whether from spending too long in academia and then too long in corporate land, or from spending too little time practicing the craft of writing in recent years, I find that my writing can be formal to the point of stiffness. I would prefer that whatever personality I may possess show through a bit and perhaps help me express my ideas more clearly. Of course, none of that has happened here, but one can hope.

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WordPress 2.9 isn’t quite out yet, although it looks like it might make it before the end of the year. Even so, many of us are playing with the betas and seeing what the new features can do. One of the features that usually gets a mention but little else is custom post types.

Post types are not new in 2.9. The post table in WordPress has had a post_type field since 2.0 which was released way back in 2005. Posts and pages are the same thing internally, but have a different value in the post_type field. This affects how they are treated by loop queries, so you don’t get pages on your archive and category pages, etc. In addition the post_type field can mark an object as a revision or an attachment.

So, today there are only four recognized values for post_type: post, page, revision, and attachment. There is no reason you couldn’t use other values, and some plugins may, but the core WordPress code will ignore those entries.

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