Introducing Twitter The New Real Time Search Engine

Twitter unveils their new homepage featuring search as their main objective. Almost all Twitter veterans know the real genius of Twitter is the search functionality. Today Twitter acknowledges this and goes head to head with Google. This should be fun because we all have front row seats!

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Twitter Gets Aggressive on Spam Accounts

Check out the housing cleaning on my Twitter @TrafficisGold account. In just one day Twitter took out 350+ accounts that where following me. This is good news people! I am a big fan of this house cleaning and think it should happen much more regularly. You can see by the picture my numbers bounced back very fast, but let’s just hope the new accounts are real people and not more spam accounts. Only time will tell. Has your account been hit? My wife’s account @YogaStuff was not affected, which means she has very few spam accounts following her. Good for her!

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You can read more about the spam cleaning at TechCrunch.

My New Twitter Policy

New Twitter Policy goes into effect today. If you have the default Twitter icon default_profile_bigger.pngor a locked account (and I don’t personally know you) I will not follow you back. How hard is it to upload an image of yourself or your company’s logo? It’s not. If you don’t want your picture up there because you are insecure then go make an avatar. Don’t want your picture up on Twitter because you’re managing a business account, cool, put up your company logo.

When I see the default logo 95% of the time it’s a spam account. The other 5% is split between people who just joined Twitter to join and complete newbies. I have nothing against newbies at all. I actually welcome them with open arms and want to help them get the most out of Twitter. I am happy to follow, just show some respect for the Twitter community and fully update your profiles. Otherwise what’s the point?

Twitter Auto DMs Suck

The abuse of the Twitter Direct Message (DM) functionality has always been an issue with Twitter. However, as my follower count grows so does the constant barrage of useless and annoying Auto Direct messages. The idea of someone trying to sell sell me an e-book or whatever, before any kind of relationship has been established seems silly and wrong. Anyway, here is a video I made regarding Twitter and Auto DM’s.

Found this great post by Robert Scoble , Love his number 8, which states:

8. I can’t put an auto answer onto DM’s so that I can tell you to get a clue and to send me email instead.

Excluding Categories in WordPress Sidebar Widget

This is a short Youtube video demo on how you can exclude categories from you side bar if using the sidebar widget. This requires us to edit the widgets.php file instead of the sidebar.php file. More how to videos can be found at the Traffic is Gold Youtube channel.

Similar Videos:
Excluding Pages In The WordPress Sidebar

We also announce our videos on Twitter, you can follow us on Twitter here: @trafficisgold.

Step by Step code credit goes to Lance Hoff

Step 1:
Download widgets.php from here: wp-includes/widgets.php

Step 2:
Find this line of code:
$d = $options[$number][‘dropdown’] ? ‘1’ : ‘0’;

under it palce this line of code: $ex = “1,2,3”;
(NOTE: change out 1,2,3 with the actual Categories you want to exclude.)

So all together it looks like this:
$d = $options[$number][‘dropdown’] ? ‘1’ : ‘0’;
$ex = “1,2,3”;

Step 3:

Find
$cat_args = array(‘orderby’ => ‘name’, ‘show_count’ => $c, ‘hierarchical’ => $h);

Replace
$cat_args = array(‘orderby’ => ‘name’, ‘show_count’ => $c, ‘hierarchical’ => $h, ‘exclude’ => $ex );

Step 4:
Save the file and uplaod back to it’s original location

You are done!!

Again thanks to Lance for the code and his step by step blog post. Please visit the site here.