As more and more people flock to Twitter it’s important to understand the tools available to help build your presence within the community. To assist in this, some time ago we added the “Extended Bio” option to Twellow profiles. This allows an additional 2,000 characters to be added to your profile in order to better explain what you have to offer. From feedback we have received I think it appropriate to provide a sample of how an Extended Bio can be formatted.

The Extended Bio allows limited HTML (hypertext markup)  so you can make your profile stand out. The allowed HTML tags are as follows:

• <p></p> – The paragraph tag. Use this to divide your bio into paragraphs.
• <a href=”" title=”"></a> – The “link” tag. Use this to create links to web pages.
• <i></i> – The italics tag. This will format your text in italics.
• <b></b> – The bold tag. This will make your text bold.
• <br /> – The line break tag. This adds a single return to the text.

To demonstrate how the various tags can be used in your bio I’ve created the following sample bio for a character named Little Man Computer (Little Man Computer is a character used to demonstrate the functions of  computer CPUs). All of the various aspects of the Extended Bio are demonstrated here:


<p><b>About Me</b></p>
<p>Hello, my name is <b>Little Man Computer</b>, and I'm working in your computer right now! I like to run fast. I also like to multi-task.
</p>
<p><b>Some of my duties include: *</b></p>
<p>
► <i>Checking the Program Counter</i><br>
► <i>Fetching instructions from the mailbox</i><br>
► <i>Incrementing the Program Counter</i><br>
► <i>Decoding instructions</i><br>
► <i>Fetching data from the mailbox</i><br>
► <i>Executing instructions</i><br>
► <i>Storing new data in the mailbox</i><br>
► <i>Repeating cycles</i>
</p>
<p>* <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_man_computer" title="See my Wikipedia entry!">please see my entry at Wikipedia.</a></p>
<p>
My favorite numbers are <i>one and zero</i>, and sometimes you can fool me into <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overclock">running faster than I was designed to</a>.
</p>
<p>
Here is a list of my favorite websites:
</p>
<p>
♥ <i><a href="http://www.twellow.com" title="Twellow, the yellow pages of Twitter!">Twellow.com</a></i><br>
♥ <i><a href="http://blog.twellow.com" title="The Twellow Blog">blog.Twellow.com</a></i><br>
♥ <i><a href="http://www.webpronews.com" title="WebProNews: Breaking eBusiness and search news">WebProNews.com</a></i>
</p>

The resulting Extended Bio on your Twellow profile page would appear as follows after saving the code:

Notice the use of the ► and the ♥ characters. These are special characters that might not be visible on all platforms, so your results may vary. You can find lists of various characters available at numerous websites around the net, such as this  page by Andrea Kalli.

And that’s it! Feel free to copy and modify the sample code to meet your needs. The Twellow Profile Editor can be found at www.twellow.com/edit where you will be able to enter your Extended Bio.

Cheers!

Matthew Daines
Twellow Lead Developer

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Frequently Asked Questions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.