This weekend my laptop was stolen from my hotel room while I was on vacation.

It wasn’t an expensive laptop… I travel with a cheap little Acer Netbook … but it was still alarming.

However, I did learn a few things from the experience.

First, if you’re keeping your laptop in your hotel room, keep the cables in the car. Your laptop is less likely to be taken if there are no cables to charge it, since it’s worth less at a pawn shop. Go figger.

Second, it is a very good thing to use Gmail or a web-based service for your email, especially when you travel. If I been using Outlook or Thunderbird, not only would the thieves been able to go back and read my email from the past, which would have included online transactions that included my address and other details, but I would have not had access to the emails saved on that hard drive any longer.

Since I have been using Gmail to access all my mail, all I had to do was change my Gmail password to keep others out, and ensure I still had access to everything. Much less panic that way.

Finally, on a computer you only use for traveling, keep the minimum or no saved FTP passwords in your FTP client. If you explicitly limit your FTP saved logins to those you’ll need on your trip, you won’t have to change every single FTP password you’ve ever used if your laptop is stolen.

Finally, never count on your stuff being safe. This apparently was the first theft in eight years at this particular establishment, which seemed quite secure, but a determined thief, or one in desperate need of some cash for a fix, will find a way to get in just about anywhere.

This evening I was scanning old newspapers from some source materials regarding the great Halifax explosion of 1917 when I found this article in the Grand Rapids Tribune from the same year:

It is a curious and mortifying condition of the prevailing “economy” that many people abundantly able to buy what they want use the situation as an
excuse for going without. What does this profit them? It merely makes them richer at a time when the talk is of being poorer, says the Hartford
Courant.

Food is one thing and clothes and other articles that shoppers buy are in a distinctly other class.

When Smith cut down the sugar, there is more sugar for Jones, and the supply of sugar Is limited. But when Mrs. Smith goes without a cloak for which she can easily pay and which she expected to buy this season, she is not helping Mrs. Jones to get it; she Is simply misering along in her own way, and to her small ability driving poor people out of work and discouraging merchants whose capital is invested. This isn’t economy, it is parsimony.

If everybody should quit making purchases, what would become of manufacturers or dealers and of the larger number of workers? It Is a good time to keep a level head. Many who watch the tendency of business say frankly that people of limited means are less saving than those who can well afford to get what they want.

I found an old primer in a bookstore, and among its selected readings was “Advice to a Young Tradesman” by Benjamin Franklin. Here are a few excerpts.

Remember that time is money. He who can earn ten shillings a day by his labor, and goes abroad or sits idle one half of that day, though he spend but six-pence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or thrown away, five shillings besides.
…
Remember that money is of a prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shillings is turned six; turned again, it is seven and three pence; and so on till it becomes a hundred pounds. The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker.
—
If you take the pains at first to mention particulars, it will have this good effect; you will discover how wonderfully small, trifling expenses mount up to large sums, and will discern what might have been, and may, for the future, be saved without occasioning any great inconvenience.
—
In short, the way to wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, industry and frugality; that is, waste neither time nor money but make the best use of both. Without industry and frugality, nothing will do, and with them, everything will do.

Twitter is mysterious. It’s odd, and it’s nearly impossible to “get” when you first give it a try. However, I’ve been seeing more and more people having success with it, so I knew I had to give it an extended try. But I didn’t want to go there without a roadmap.

The roadmap I chose was Joel Comm’s Twitter Power book. He covers Twitter fairly thoroughly, and even has a 30 day plan to become successful with Twitter.

Since I don’t have 30 days to spend trying to decide whether Twitter is going to be useful for me, I decided to compress his plan into a full week. Here’s my diary as I did so, starting on Saturday, and ending on Friday (the date of this post). I kept a bit of a diary as I went along.

Day 1

A long time ago (it seems) I signed up for a Twitter account. I looked. I posted, I followed a few folks, but I didn’t get it, and I dropped the matter after a single day.

So, after reading the first few chapters of Twitter Power, I was still skeptical. Still, no point in knocking it till it’s tried in earnest, right? So…..

I started a brand new profile, since my old one just seemed to have FAIL written all over it.

Following the advice in the book, I added a picture (an avatar, actually) and customized my Twitter page using Joel Comm’s profile background as my example.

I just couldn’t use link blue in my sidebar, though. It looked lousy.

My first tweets were basically self-congratulatory messages that I managed to make my profile pretty. Lame, I know, but that’s what I was doing. Happily, someone tweeted back that they liked what I had done. Yay! My first friend.

I followed about 20 people today, got about the same number of people following me. I replied to a few tweets. Got a replies back.

Not a bad start.

Day 2

Woke up, and found myself heading to Twitter before checking email. Yikes!

About a dozen people began following me last night! What a rush.

Made a few tweets today. Not too many. Learned how to retweet.

Not a terribly productive Twitter day, probably because I was only able to tweet for about two hours during the day.

The day was saved when I had an exchange with someone in my niche that I arranged to interview for an article. Ahhh. Networking. Now I’m getting it.

Day 3

Ah, the weekend’s over. Time to get back into things in earnest.

Today I added a WordPress plugin to my niche site that tweets my new blog post headlines. I used TwitMyBlog.com, but since I didn’t like the top frame, I edited the code so that the link went straight to my site.

This was a turning point. Two of the blog posts that got tweeted got retweeted by other people, and then again by other people who retweeted their retweets. By the end of the day, I had 180 followers.

Day 4

Woke up today to a magical number. 200 followers!

Discovered twimailer.com. Oh this is sooooooooooo much better than getting the standard new follower mail. You can see all the info you need to decide whether or not to follow someone following you right in the alert email. A huge time saver!

Joined my first Twitter club, even though I still don’t know what a Twitter club is. Tried to figure out what hash symboled words are for, and how to use them.

Didn’t have much time for Twitter today, and when I did try to check new twitters, I got the fail whale. So I focused on adding new content to my site and blog instead.

Follower total at the end of the day: 241

Day 5

Woke up to 261 followers. You’d think a reply from @GodtheFather would bring in a few more than 20 new followers. I guess faith is dwindling.

Got into a few short conversations early in the day. Dwindled off as I worked on other things and had a few meetings throughout the afternoon.

300 followers at bedtime.

Day 6

It was a slow night, I guess, as there were only 6 new followers this morning. Got started with a conversation begun the night before while I made coffee.

An early retweet , then not much else for most of the day.

Checked Google Analytics, and Twitter is now the 4th largest non-search traffic source to my site. Not too bad!

Early in the evening I made an effort to add some new followers. Sure enough, got some extra juice from a retweet and a greeting from one of the people I followed. Plus I found someone who passed along one of my article URLs that I tweeted without a retweet. I’m sure as heck not complaining as long as it gives me traffic… in fact, I think I’ll retweet it.

330 followers at bedtime.

Day 7

351 followers was the number that greeted me when I woke up (late) this morning. I’m going to set a goal of 400 followers by the end of the day. It doesn’t seem too unreachable.

Since today was #followfriday, it turned out that getting to 400 was pretty easy. It also helped that I got a retweet from one of the most powerful tweeters in my niche. Yay me!

I made contact with a few more people that will do interviews and/or articles for me, so I feel like I’ve accomplished quite a lot.

Final notes:

I tried to follow a compressed version of Joel Comm’s 30 day plan from Twitter Power, though I found myself getting ahead of the plan quite often, just through natural curiosity.

It’s interesting that I’m paying a LOT more attention to my blog post titles now that they’re getting twittered directly from the blog. And I’m keeping my eye out for more hot-button stories where I used to look for more evergreen topics, so twittering has even changed my blogging habits.

I’m feeling skeptical about sequencing as Joel Comm describes it in Twitter Power. I look at the number of people I’m following and there’s no way I can discern any sequence in any of their tweets… not that I even see all their tweets. Even if I stared at my screen constantly, the flow of tweets is more than I could keep up with. And many of the people I’m following are following even larger numbers. Besides that, if people go to my profile, my sequence is reversed, and while I’m still building followers, it’s more likely that someone will see a reversed sequence of tweets than that someone is going to notice all my tweets in a sequence as I tweet them.

(As I read the above paragraph, I can imagine some archaeologist of the future reading this and thinking, “WTF?” In fact, I’m reading it thinking, “WTF?!?” I don’t know what you thought while reading it, but I’m guessing it’s along the lines of, “WTF!?”)

However, I do believe there are probably optimal times to tweet in order to get a maximum number of retweets. And probably an optimal time to post an action tweet. That info would be much more useful than sequencing.

A recently upgraded WP blog looked great, seemed to be working great, until we noticed it wasn’t counting comments. It listed all posts as having 0 comments, even if they had one, or several.

I’d never had the problem before, but since a Google search produced lots and lots of other people having the same problem… going as far back as WP 2.5 … I thought I better not lose this link to a bit of php code which solved the problem handily.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/164904