My Twitter Background Image

Whether you run a corporate or a personal Twitter account, your background image can say a lot about you.  I want to explain my often questioned background, and then give you some pointers for what makes an effective background for company tweets.

I get a surprising amount of direct messages from people telling me that they like my Twitter background image, and they want to know what it is.  Popular guesses include “steel mine” and anything to do with railroads.  Off-the-wall guesses include stuff from the Sci-Fi channel and “jet engine factory”.  The real answer is…a copper mine!  Not just any copper mine, it’s one that my great-grandfather was the manager of in Arizona.  I don’t know the exact date of the pic, but from what I understand (and this is understanding passed down a few generations, so who knows if it’s true or not) he actually took that picture.  It would make sense to me as I pulled it out of a photo album that included dozens of other pictures of him, other family members and more pics of Arizona copper mines than I ever thought possible.

Late last night I switched my primary domain, MattSingley.com, to a new host after receiving a lot of messages yesterday that my web site was displaying “Service Is Unavailable”.  Although I get traffic spikes from time to time, this blog doesn’t pull so much traffic that it should shut down with modest increases, even after mentions by the L.A. Times and Mashable.  Given that, I have selected Media Temple as my new host to see how things go.  I’ve been impressed with other sites’ stability that are hosted there, I love the fact that they talk about easy scalability and recognize that spikes in traffic do happen, and I’m particularly impressed with their Twitter team. It sounds like a winning combination to me!