The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo. Seemed quite interesting and easy to understand.

At a closer look, Twitter seems a mere waste of time.

While smoking 10 cigarettes a day, you waste both money and health. The time and money invested in smoking could be used for running and exercising. Money is saved, and health is restored.

An ugly comparison with Twitter. These days bloggers are compelled to use Twitter in order not to be left behind. It’s a tag above their head saying “I’m writing on Twitter right now”. It could easily become an unbreakable loop.

I noticed people brag themselves with meaningless metrics such as “Twitter followers”. I noticed people following other people based on number of followers.

Twitter is quantity, not quality. I could call Twitter an “immature adolescent plaything”.

There’s an egomaniac making a lot of noise over there, a drama queen behind you, someone boasting about business to a large group of people they just met and someone else having a noisy emotional meltdown in the doorway. That’s what Twitter can be like. (ZDNET)

I’ll still be on Twitter, the only difference is that it’s going to be automatic. I’m using a plugin to post both to the blog and Twitter.

Finally, I signed up for a Twitter account. I’m just giving it a try. So, if you want to follow, go ahead. I’ll try to find some time to post there frequently.

I also started reading an interesting resource from Smashing Magazine, Tips to Become Successful with Twitter. I just want to see what will come out of this.

Are you successful with Twitter? How? And why?

I’m talking about corporate web sites. I did the same mistakes ever and ever again. How many times have you seen a web design company website with an outdated copyright year in the footer? Countless times. This is one of them I’m sure the company is doing just fine, and the latest project just ended a week ago. Why not update the site?

The corporate website is often neglected and the design is ugly and outdated. It was hip 5 years ago, but now it simply doesn’t appeal anymore. So what, they have a marketing department dealing with clients, why should they update and redesign the site?

And when the time finally comes, the costs are exaggerated. They need a new CMS, new SEO strategies, new promotion tactics, a lot of custom programming for stuff like useless AJAX widgets, JavaScript clocks and Flash splash pages.

I decided to use WordPress for my company web site and it’s running just great. Easy to update, easy to add or remove widgets, and it’s very easy to present my services both in Romanian and in English. I decided to keep te products section in English as Butterfly Organizer, .mailr, em(phasis) and Query Admin receive a lot of visits from many countries. All the other sections such as services, portfolio, gallery and contact have been written in Romanian, because this is my primary target.

Another change I will be doing soon is to move the themes from the company site to this blog. The main website is for presentation and portfolio only.

I’m doing this for years and I know it by heart. You need Apache, PHP, MySQL and maybe some more tools and libraries if you plan to do big things. You might need GD library, mod_rewrite, Perl and some more stuff.

Go ahead and download Server2GO, a mature software package containing everything you need for running both a PHP page containing <?php echo “Hello, World”;?> and a WordPress installation with hundreds of plugins.

Extract it somewhere on your hard drive, I’d recommend the root because it will save you a long path in some config scripts. Customize the config.ini file and you’re ready to go.

Just follow the instructions inside and you’ll be running your first PHP/MySQL script in no time!