Many people will use Twitter counter badge from TwitterCounter.com to show twitter count in their website or blog, but twitter counter badges from TwitterCounter.com didn’t come with color personalization, sometimes it can’t match the color of the theme, so I don’t like to use it.

If you want to display Twitter count in plain text, you can follow the below steps.

1. Add the following code to functions.php.

function string_getInsertedString($long_string,$short_string,$is_html=false){
  if($short_string>=strlen($long_string))return false;
  $insertion_length=strlen($long_string)-strlen($short_string);
  for($i=0;$i<strlen($short_string);++$i){
    if($long_string[$i]!=$short_string[$i])break;
  }
  $inserted_string=substr($long_string,$i,$insertion_length);
  if($is_html && $inserted_string[$insertion_length-1]=='<'){
    $inserted_string='<'.substr($inserted_string,0,$insertion_length-1);
  }
  return $inserted_string;
}

function DOMElement_getOuterHTML($document,$element){
  $html=$document->saveHTML();
  $element->parentNode->removeChild($element);
  $html2=$document->saveHTML();
  return string_getInsertedString($html,$html2,true);
}

function getFollowers($username){
  $x = file_get_contents("http://twitter.com/".$username);
  $doc = new DomDocument;
  @$doc->loadHTML($x);
  $ele = $doc->getElementById('follower_count');
  $innerHTML=preg_replace('/^<[^>]*>(.*)<[^>]*>$/',"\\1",DOMElement_getOuterHTML($doc,$ele));
  return $innerHTML;
}

2. Copy and paste the following short code to anywhere on your theme files, remember replace your twitter username.

<?php echo getFollowers("yourtwitterusername")." followers"; ?>

Personally, I prefer to display my blog categories without in drop down box, but if you really have many categories on your blog, perhaps you can display categories in drop-down box so that your blog will looks more neat.

Below is the simple code to display categories:-

<h2>Categories</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name'); ?>
</ul>

To display categories in drop-down box, use the following code.

<form action="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/" method="get">
<?php
$select = wp_dropdown_categories('show_option_none=Select category&show_count=1&orderby=name&echo=0');
$select = preg_replace("#<select([^>]*)>#", "<select$1 onchange='return this.form.submit()'>", $select); echo $select; ?>
<noscript><input type="submit" value="View" /></noscript>
</form>