Introduction

Every morning I start my day by checking what’s hot and fresh on the Internet. It’s crucial for my work and inspiration. It’s like the daily fuel depot and I need my fix before I can go to town with a new Tutorial or another design.

There are plenty of sites that may inspire you to take another step on the ladder to become the ultimate designer/blogger (which we all know we’ll never be. lol). However, I want to list the sites that I find very useful and inspiring to start off the day with. Even if you’re a full on logo designer or a print artist you always need references to some great work in order to be able to think clear. It’s like sweeping the floor before you go to town knowing you’ll come home to a clean house.

Well anyways, here are my morning fix that I always check out…in chronological order of course:

1st Stop – Sillicon Alley Insider

The first thing I want to do in the morning is to check what goes on in the most computer savvy town in the world. I love reading about the new and exciting startups and also the demise some companies will face due to ignorance and plain stupidity. This is a sure place to get your fix for all things brand new and how.

2nd Stop – Hacker News

After reading about the shape of our business the “Hacker” part of me needs it’s morning juice. This site concentrates on the more, let’s say, grass root news. It shares everything from bully news to song choice of the day. I love this site because it show how people actually think. How they react to the events of the computer industry and it’s million dollar failures and wins.

3rd Stop – ZDNet

To get a second opinion of things I switch back to the more “reality” based new again. This site shows you the “BIG” news. The news that will affect us all within the near future. It presents it’s news in a more serious light which gives yet another perspective to what’s going on in the industry.

4th Stop – Wired

All read up on the latest and greatest news I need a more in depth and “genre” based journalism. Who doesn’t know about Wireds interviews and gadget reporting. I just love a good fix of the in depth news they bring. Simply a great place for that little extra knowledge.

5th Stop – Gizmodo

Alright, we’re done with the news. We are all stocked up on the newest and hottest trends and some not so pleasant company closures. Time to feed the odd news pocket with some great micro-news. These guys always finds the odd things in the world and their reporting i great! A must have in any morning breakfast fix!

6th Stop – Mashable

Oh yeah, Mashable. A true and honest friend for all things Twitter and development. I love the variation of articles they have and the way they always get me interested in things I never thought I’d even care to use the energy to turn my eyes to. A great start in the morning and a great inspiration source for some new tips & tricks!

7th Stop – Favorite Website Awards

After smoothly going from serious news to the tips and tricks we can use everyday, I just have to check THE FWA. It’s a really well thought of website that awards the best Flash websites with a prestegious award EACH DAY! Every day the have a new website in the spotlight. And as a Flash website designer this is just the perfect place to keep yourself up to date with all the new trends. BUT, it’s not only for Flash developers. There are TONS of great websites in here with Awesome graphics so it’s a must for anyone that is working with design, any genre!

8th Stop – Design Float

Well, who doesn’t know of Design float. It’s the greatest and most useful place to start off your day. PLENTY of links to the most useful things, any category. Everything from programming to simple tutorials in Photoshop. It’s just a lovely place to start off the creative process.

9th Stop – CG Society

Coming to the end of the list it’s important, at least for me, to get my brain started up on some eye goodies. Something that will get my brain going in a sense of graphic splendour! CG Society have everything you’ll ever need as far as Graphic Inspiration. Everything from behind the scenes interviews to a GREAT 3D forum gallery where you can rate an check out some of the worlds best 3D designers. This is a fuel up for sure! For anyone!

10th Stop – Wimp

All stocked up on news, tips & tricks and graphical inspiration it’s time to end this list with some fun. We all know that working in design can be tedious and boring if things doesn’t come out the way you intended them to. Or if the client simply keeps changing his mind over and over again. Wimp will is sure to put a smile on your face. They present the latest and greatest videos of people doing incredible stunts or just plain in depth documents of things currently happening in the world. Only downside with this link is that it’s WAY to addicting!

Well, that’s my morning fix and I always use it to get inspired. Does it work for you, I don’t know. Is there any other great sites that you know of that might kick start my or someone else’s morning please add it in a comment. I am sure everyone is interested in knowing.

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Thanks!

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Here is the full an true story of what happened today, Tuesday 17th of February 2009. The day when everyone got together to make 4 people get back up.

Well, today was one of those weird days that really started off with a bang. At first, this looked to become just another day. I was writing a new blog post, chatting with a friend through AIM and checking some emais. It was about 5.30 in the morning when it happened. I was to re-tweet a blog post of mine that I just finished up (“Apple vs. The Rest – Brilliant!”) when I suddenly got a red square message on top of my web based Twitter form.

Your Twitter account has been suspended due to suspicious activity and will be investigated further. If you want to know why your account has been suspended please contact the Twitter Support Team for more information.

My jaw dropped to the floor wondering what I might have done wrong. First I was panicking as I had been working hard on posting good content on my blog (this blog) to gain followers and interest as a Twitter and a blog owner. As I started investigating what might have caused this unfair suspension I saw my followers starting to decrease. First one, then another 3. All in all I saw a decrease of exactly 10 people. First I thought people started unfollowing me for some reason I wasn’t yet aware of.

But it stopped at 10 and my TweetDeck application stopped updating tweets. I was shocked to say the least. I clicked the link to the support to shed some light on what my mistake could have been. But as I read through the heavy list of reason why they would suspend your account I couldn’t figure out one single reason why my account would have been suspended. I had done nothing of what would make your account get suspended.

I quickly searched for the Support Submission form and found it within like 10 seconds. I wrote:

I feel my account has been unfairly suspended!! i was about to twitter my latest blog posts and I got suspended. I have a small following group that can verify my NON suspicious behaviour and I would really like to have my account unsuspended immediately.

My account is @Minervity and I can in whatever way you want prove that I am not a spammer or doing anything that i shouldn’t be doing. I am RT’ing peoples shareings and talking to people.

Please unsuspend immediately.

It was sent exactly Feb. 17th 08.14. I wanted to know what was up and also tell my wonderful followers that I had been suspended without reason so I created an emergancy account and started talking to my closest friends on Twitter. I had been following these guys since the very start.

As I started following some people it didn’t take long before I got the imfamous message:

This account has been suspended. Nothing to see here. Now move along.

I got them for @cameronolivier, @imjustcreative and @cristianvasile. I was so confused. What was going on! These guys are like the coolest and the nicest guys ever. Why were they suspended as well?

I started a convo with @mayhemstudios to see if he had any information on what might have happened. After all, the guy had been around for almost a year and should know what the heck was up. Unfortunately he was as surprised as I was about the whole thing.

@joshhemsley and @mayhemstudios quickly started a rescue campaign to make sure something was done. These guys rock! They launched a full scale campaign to spread the word about this unfair suspension and even created a “Free The Twitters” campaign page. It can be found here: “HELP Bring Back These Twitter Users!”

Here’s a screen shot of the page:

With followers heavily dedicated to make sure Twitter undid their wrong doings, people started RT:ing the message over and over again rapidly making us the most talked about Twitter for the day. The rescue RT read:

Help @imjustcreative @cameronolivier @Minervity — Accounts all suspended! — Send complaints to suspended@twitter.com

It became this viral message showing up everywhere. I want to believe that the Twitter crew got a bit overtaken by the load of people trying to help us get our accounts back. At least I was. With joy in my heart I couldn’t do much more than wait to see what was going to happen.

The RT:ing just got more fired up when we realized that it was something really wrong going on. At one point a few of us received a cryptic tweet that read:

@mayhemstudios The #hashtagmafia rubbed @imjustcreative, @cameronolivier & @minervity out. #respect

We didn’t make much of it but the thoughts that came to me made me smile. Someone was trying to ride the stream.

We all pretty much just kept up the spirit thinking something must be done soon. At one point I read somewhere that it would take the Twitter Support team between 5-7 work days to investigate why my account was unfairly suspended. 5-7 WORK DAYS!!

At 12.34 I received an email from Twitter support. An email that spurred some conversation amongst the people on twitter. It read:

Your account has been restored. It would appear that you have a number of spammers following you and using your material for their own accounts and, as a result, you were caught up in a spam cloud (through no fault of your own) and suspended. Please notify us if you encounter any other issues.

Cheers,
Del

Wow, I thought. This is messed up. But before I go in to any details of the email I want to give huge props to this “Del” for acting so fast to restore our accounts. Twitter, guys like these deserve a salary raise. He’s clearly doing his job. Way faster than your 5-7 work day average resolve time. Del, thank you, whoever you are.

The email I got from the support is quite interesting.

First of all, it proves they have auto-suspension on Twitter. No matter who you are or what you have or haven’t done. If you end up in the spam cloud you obviously get suspended without explanation or reason.

Second, “Spam Cloud”. What is that anyways. We tried to discuss it and our conclusion was pretty much something of a filter checking if something is over RT:ed sending it in to the “Spam Cloud” setting the flag of anyone twittering it. This seem very dodgy and stupid as Twitters whole purpose is to spread news, fast.

Third, why did WE end up in the “cloud”? None of us has the intention of spamming anything. As long as I have followed these guys I have enjoyed ever second of it and I think their followers feel the same way. Shouldn’t there be at least a warning or an “investigate” group where you end up before they decide whether you are a spammer or not?

Even though they had restored our accounts we still couldn’t follow each other. At first it looked like they had regulated our relations. Somewhat saying we couln’t RT each others tweets.This seemed so wrong and as we started up another campaign but it soon died down again as our accounts started behaving like they were supposed to again.

It seems like our account where actually re-activated because we all started getting these automated DM’s. And it wasn’t one or two. It was 10-20 at a time. It’s 13.47 right now and I am still receiving them. Hoping they will stop as time goes by. @mayhemstudios has written several tweets about automated “Thank You For Following” DM’s and now I understand him. Dude, I sign whatever petition you throw at me just to get these “spammers” to stop using them bots.

In the end came another interesting twist. From the same cryptic group of stream hijackers cam this message:

If you’s guys need anything, I mean anything… don’t hesitate to ask. The olive branch has been extended to you @Minervity. #hashtagmafia

Once again this person/group tried to ride the tweet stream. It’s quite ironic that these people try so hard. Isn’t it!

Before I end this recap of today’s events I would also like to thank @sh3n3rd and @modbird for launching their own campaign to save us from the jaws of infinity. You guys helped us alot and I (and I know the other guys is as well) am humbled by the generousity and the dedication you spent on us to get us back up again. Hugs to you both!

Isn’t it weird how a day can go from silent to rockstar just to fade out into the same ole ordinary twittering.

Thank you all for your support and thank you for taking the time to read this! Who knows, maybe you are next! Be careful!

Best Regards,

Twinster / @Minervity