Have you ever been on Twitter and read something from a follower and thought, YES! that is awesome. Maybe they said something hilarious, maybe they did something cool, or perhaps they found a really good link. As a result of this, a natural reaction is to want to give them credit, award them in some way.

The other side of the coin is also true. When someone makes a bonehead mistake or a jackass comment, who doesn’t want to knock them down a peg?

Enter tweetpoint.me. I created tweetpoint to quantify these notions. By sending a twitter reply to both @tweetpoint and @someone you can award (or takeaway) a point to this person. The syntax is simple:

@tweetpoint @whitman +1 for creating tweetpoint.

@tweetpoint @whitman -1 because tweetpoint sucks.

You will notice that after the point value I have added context to the action. This will make watching the tweetpoint stream fun because we will see what cool things are earning points and, better yet, what dumbass happenings are losing points.

Visiting tweetpoint.me allows us to view the tweetpoint stream, see the leader board (aggregated by hour, day, week, or all time and optionally filtered by a location search), and see an individual Twitter user’s tweetpoint profile.

Essentially, tweetpoint is a subjective version of TwitterGrader. At tweetpoint.me your value as a Twitter user is evaluated based on the opinions of others rather than usage statistics.

When someone says or does something that I value, I feel compelled to give them credit. On the other hand, when one says or does something idiotic, I believe they need to be knocked back down.

This is how I came up with the idea for tweetpoint, my first Twitter application. I was really excited by my idea and when I ran it by the guys in the office Thursday afternoon, these feelings were reciprocated. So, this increased my excitement and when I am pumped up about something, I have this tendency to dive right in and attack.

So, here the rundown of how tweetpoint went from concept to completion in just about 20 hours.

Thursday after work I engineered the app. I decided on a function list and built a database schematic. The user flow diagram never left my head as I went right into wireframing the entire site.

Friday, I pretty much took the day off of work to build tweetpoint. I borrowed Phil for about an hour so that he could give tweetpoint a logo and a graphic framework. While he was designing away, I setup my database and wrote all the queries.

After a Chipotle break around noon, I wrote the markup for Phil’s design. He laid out the homepage and I extrapolated from there to create the other views. I hooked up the queries with PHP and so it was time to dive into the Twitter API and load data into my local database.

Although I am bothered by the fact that it doesn’t use oAuth, the Twitter API is pretty powerful. It’s super easy to use and it let’s you do anything you want with Twitter. So, creating a script to load in all replies to @tweetpoint and parse their content was really a piece of cake.

Friday evening was spent in the office with Nick doing some stealth testing to see that things were being loaded properly and points were being added up appropriately.

Saturday afternoon then was cleanup and minor improvements, I had to rewrite some CSS to make IE6 act right (but that’s nothing new) and I added some cool little bits of functionality like the ability to award points to multiple people with a single tweet (@tweetpoint @guy1 @guy2 … @guyN +1).

Then, Saturday night, before I went out, I launched it into the world of Twitter.

Often when using an unordered list for navigation, I desire the <li>’s inside to be floated left. This affords me the ability to style them in any which way possible (margins, width, backgrounds, etc), but also have them arrange horizontally.

It is also likely that inside these <li>’s I will have <a> tags that I have chosen to give display: block. Again, display: block gives me the full gamut of CSS styles.

Upon doing this, I always open up IE6 and see that it appears the float: left did not apply to my <li>’s.

Since this only occurs when the <a> has display block, here is what I believe is happening. The display block from the child forces the floated <li> to take the full width of its parent instead of only the width necessary as is customary with floats.

SOLUTION: It is simple. Just give the <a> tag a float: left as well and it will fall inline (pun most certainly intended).