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Watch this video called Twitter in Plain English.

Brought to you by the Common Craft show.

I am not a coder. But I am a do it yourselfer. And with all my blogs, I either find out how to write code to accomplish a specific task, or I find a plugin. And this post is a bit of both.

First, take a look at my post regarding the addition of aerial golf course maps on my Columbus, Ohio centric blog the270.

At the end of my narrative, you will find a list of golf courses added to the blog. The list is automatic. That is, as I continue to add aerial golf course maps, WordPress automatically includes those maps to the list. I don’t have to go back and manually code the list.

First Create a Parent Page

The first step in how I accomplished this was to create a page called “Golf”. To do, go to the Write Page tab and create a page with the Page Title “Golf”.

Next create Child pages

After I created the Golf page, which appears as  http://the270.com/golf/, I created individual pages with the Golf course as the name of the page. In the right hand sidebar, goto the Page Parent field and select “Golf” as the parent page. Of course, your parent page will differ according to the name of your page.

The PHP code needed to display the “child” pages in alphabetical order

Next I did inserted the following PHP code in the text “code” field of my post.

<ul>
<?php wp_list_pages(’child_of=63&sort_column=post_title&title_li=&depth=1′) ?>
</ul>
The number “63″ of the above code corresponds to the ID code of the “Golf” page that I created. To determine the ID number of your page, goto the Manage > Pages tabs and search for your page title. The ID number will be to the left.

In the example above, the “Golf Club of Dublin” post is a child of the “Golf” post. Hypothetically, I could have created another page with the “Golf Club of Dublin” being the parent. In this hypothetical, that post would be I guess the grandchild of the “Golf” post. I would not want to display the grandchild pages in my list. So to exclude grandchildren, you set the depth as 1 in the PHP code above.

But we are not yet finished.

Plugin to run PHP code within WordPress pages or posts

If I stopped with the above and published the post, the list would not have generated. That’s because WordPress ignores PHP code within posts or pages. That’s where the plugin runPHP comes in handy. After you activate this plugin, you can insert PHP code within your posts or pages, and they will work.

In the right sidebar, all you need to do is make sure there is a check mark in the box next to the words “run PHP code?”

After that, just publish and let WordPress and PHP run its magic.

It amazes me when I see a Google AdWords advertisement without the URL of the advertiser. Why?

Because one purpose of advertising on Google AdWords is to build “brand” awareness for your web address!

Imagine watching a commercial on TV for a cool new product that you would like to buy. But whoops, the advertiser didn’t tell you the name of the product. So the advertiser misses out on a sale.

So what you say. With AdWords, people can just click on the ad and see what it is you are selling. Not so fast. Not everyone will click on your advertisement. Perhaps less than 5% of your page impressions will be converted to clicks. But if you place your URL on your ad, you’ll build “brand” awareness in your web address. Thus, when a potential customer is ready to use your service, they would hopefully remember your URL and type it directly in the address bar rather than having to happen upon your ad while surfing.

And Because AdSense Publishers cannot click on the advertisements

Here’s another reason. Google AdSense publishers get paid a portion from advertisements placed on their web pages. They cannot however click on those advertisements. Because if they do, they could be banned by Google for click fraud. And no one wants that. But what’s an ethical AdSense Publisher to do if he sees an intriguing AdWords ad? He can’t click it. But he can type the address into the address bar. But only if the URL is displayed.

Want to see what I mean? Take a look at this screen shot from my blog Instantly Iconic:

The ads on the right contain the URL of the advertisers. The ones on the left do not.

If I were in the market for K-Swiss shoes, I could go directly to Amazon or Dicks Sporting Goods by typing in the web address. I would totally bypass the two advertisers on the left. Which would be a shame for them because they missed out on a possible sale. And it may be a shame for me if one of those two offered the lowest price on K-Swiss shoes.

In the spirit of Twitter, I’ll keep this short.

Much has been written about the social network benefits of Twitter. And I’ll get to that later. But not in this post.

Rather, I encourage you to use Twitter to help you in your writing.

How?

Twitter Forces You to be Concise

Each “tweet” (slang for an update posted on Twitter) is limited to 140 characters. Anything beyond gets cut off. So you have to get to the point.

Tweeting forces you to look at the words you write. And hack of unnecessary words. Or look for shorter words that mean the same thing. Which translates to better writing.

And that’s the point.

===

Follow me on Twitter: wyliemac.

If you don’t watch any other video today/this week/this month/this year, watch the video below of Gary Vaynerchuck at the Strategic Profits Live 08 conference. More below the video about Gary.

There are some powerful statements in the video. Such as:

• We are fundamentally in a Gold Rush right now.
• This is a branding game.
• Hollywood fundamentally understands that its next core of celebrities will come out of the Internet.
• A lot of you are continuing to build the brand of the people that are bigger than you .
• You don’t need the endorsement of people that are in the same game as you, from people that are ahead of you.
• You need to differentiate yourself and establish yourself.
• Don’t buy lists. Make lists.

I will admit that I have never hear of Gary Vaynerchuck before today. Luckily for me, one of the people that I follow on Twitter linked to Brian Solis’ post about Gary on PR 2.0. Brian says that Gary personifies “Internet Famous”. The clip above is just a taste of why that is so.

Go to Gary’s Wine Library TV vlog to really find out what makes this guy so special.