When you sign up for twitter you might be a bit confused as to what to do next. If you just start tweeting you might feel a bit lonely and not sure why you are doing it.

I suggest you create a follow plan for your account. Here are some plans I have seen and how to achieve them…

Friends and Family
If you just want to follow friends and family then twitter makes it easy for you to invite them using there email address.

Also if you use services like Gmail, AOL or Yahoo you can import your users on twitter as well.

If you want to find friends from Facebook you will have to do it manually by going to each friends profile and viewing their email. That can take awhile but the Facebook Terms of Service prevents you from using a program like Profilicious 1.

Around Me
If you want to follow people that live around you twitter search is a powerful tool for that. I like the ability to know what is going on around me and having neighbours who can answer local questions. This technique also allows for more tweetups as you get to know the other people around you.

To find people around you set your near this place, within this distance and click search.

Niche Follow
If you talk about one topic or several topics you might want to only follow others who are in that niche. To do that simply do a search for a keyword and start viewing and following profiles you feel are interesting.

I suggest for better results to add -http -www to your search term.

Follow Me Follow You
Some people believe that part of social media is to follow those that follow them. They say if they have taken the time to get to know you then it is good manners to get to know them. You can manually add people by click in your Followers in your profile and click on the ‘Follow” button for those people you are not already following.

Market Me
If you purely want to use twitter as a marketing platform and do not wish to follow anyone you may find that twitter might not be the best platform for that. I used twitter as a marketing platform for the blog before understanding it. The results were not as good as they have been since moving away from this model.

If you wish to market yourself I suggest you mix in 1 marketing tweet with 3-4 person tweets for a better result.

What is your following plan on twitter? Is it working for you?

Now that you’ve gotten your plugin approved in the Plugin Directory, and understand how the directory structure works, it’s time to upload (or “check in”) your plugin files to your Subversion repository. Remember that you check in your plugin files as simply that, the files. The Plugin Directory will automatically create a zip suitable for downloading.

First of all, checkout your Subversion repository into a directory on your computer. Copy your plugin files into the appropriate directories (creating a new tag and branch if need be). Remember to create your readme.txt files.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to indicate that you want to add those files to the repository. If you’re using TortoiseSVN, right click in your checkout folder, then go TortoiseSVN > Add and select the files you want to add to the repository. If you’re using Terminal, cd into your checkout folder and run svn add */*.

Once you have “added” these files, you can now check them in (upload) to the repository. Using TortoiseSVN, right click and click SVN Commit. You can then choose the files to add, and a “commit message” (a short blurb describing what you have just committed). Using Terminal, run svn ci -m ‘commit message here’.

Assuming your readme.txt files have been done correctly, your plugin should show up in the Plugin Directory for download within 15 minutes

Those of you who are quite familiar with the WordPress community may recognize the name Alex King. He as been around for quite some time, developing a wide range of WordPress customizations and plug-ins. One of his most recent creations is a WordPress plug-in called Delink Comment Author.

Let’s say that your blog recently received a valuable or insightful comment, but it happened to come from someone who may be a spammer or is promoting a website that may not be appropriate for your audience. For example, they may have entered an affiliate link in the URL section of your comment form. Alternatively, the URL might lead to an adult, hate, or warez site of some kind. This doesn’t detract from the value of the comment, but you don’t want that link there.

Normally, you’d have to go into your WordPress dashboard, go to the Comments section, and edit the comment manually to remove this link. There are several steps involved and you will go through several pages in your WordPress Control Panel before you are able to remove the URL. Alex King’s new Delink Comment Author plugin significantly simplifies the process.

When you receive the comment e-mail notification as you normally would, it will now contain a link that removes the commentator’s link from their comment. It only takes one click. To download and for more information, check out Delink Comment Author at AlexKing.org

Last week we asked do you feel spam laws should be tougher and 88% said yes. Aren’t you a bit surprised to see that it is not 100%? I guess some people like spam. This weeks question is…

Maximizing your personal potential.  Wellness is an active process of becoming aware of and making choices toward a healthy and fulfilling life. Wellness is more than being free from illness. Wellness is a dynamic process of change and growth. The interrelated dimensions of wellness: physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, social, environmental, financial and occupational. Each dimension is equally vital in the pursuit of optimum health.

Our exciting new Wellness Lifestyle series will discuss each of these dimensions, starting with our first seminar in June

• Interested in staying youthful and full of vitality?
• Looking to restore the health that you have lost?
• Uncertain about your finances in uncertain times?

Come join us for insight into these issues, in an highly entertaining, highly informative, and hopefully inspiring seminar!!

When is the event happening?
Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Where is it happening?
Kwantlen University – Langley Campus – 20901 Langley Bypass

Registration
To register for this event RSVP here

To begin working with a MySQL database in PHP, we’ll first need one. We need to create a MySQL user (with a password) and a MySQL database, then associate them with each other. Doing this is simple, but it can vary on how it is done depending on your webhost.

If your webhost runs cPanel (like BlueFur does), you’ll be able to do this all from under MySQL Databases once you have logged in. If you just have phpMyAdmin (with root privileges), you can do this under Privileges.

Once you have created your MySQL user and database (be sure to make note of the username, password and database name while creating them), we’re able to connect to MySQL within PHP. Connecting to a MySQL database using PHP is actually a two-step process. First we need to connect to the MySQL server, then we need to select the database we want to work with.

We use mysql_connect() to connect to the MySQL server, then mysql_select_db() to select the database. These functions work like this:

[code language="php"]$mysql = mysql_connect('host', 'user', 'password');
$select = mysql_select_db('database', $mysql);[/code]

The host is usually localhost, unless your MySQL server is hosted on a separate server, in which case it will be the IP address of that server. The user and password are those of the MySQL user you created earlier. The database is the name of the database you created.

There you are, connected to the MySQL server and database, and ready to manipulate it… almost. Next week we’ll be going over database structures.