Category Archives: Web

Two Week Blog Break

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I am going to be mostly offline until May 30th, so I probably won’t have any new posts until June.

The redesign is mostly finished. There are still a few things I want to fix, but that will have to wait for now. The good news is the site looks awesome on mobile and the new search engine is much better. It not only searches posts, but your comments as well. Results are not returned in date order, but weighed for relevancy. If you have a WordPress site, look into Relevanssi. Their free version is excellent.

When you do a blog redesign, you stumble upon older posts. Some that are still good and others that aren’t. As tempted as I am to remove some of the stinkers, I don’t. A blog is place where I can throw up an idea that was on my mind that day. It doesn’t mean that I’ll keep that opinion. I often don’t.

critical-mas-1998

Critical MAS logo from 1997.

The Critical MAS blog now has 1,898 posts and 7,825 comments. It has 487,633 words (not counting this post). Finding the good posts can be difficult for even me. While I am away, I’ll be thinking about better ways to highlight the better posts. The BEST OF section above is OK, but not ideal. Until then, here are 10 random posts I still like.

  1. Tales From the Glitter Gym – The Commando
  2. The Problem With Boot Camp Training
  3. Space Needle For $1
  4. How To Get Lower Rent
  5. Rejecting Nutrition
  6. True Job Insurance Means Shorting Your Own Company
  7. Rejecting the Naked Warrior
  8. How Tim Ferriss REALLY Gained 34 Pounds of Muscle in 28 Days
  9. Blinded By Successful Outcomes
  10. Kimchi 2.0

 

New Offer from 23andMe

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I just got an email from a 23andMe account representative that they are now offering 20% additional kits.

Explore your DNA with your family. Now 20% off on all additional kits.

For those that are interested in learning more about my experiences with 23andMe, see these two posts.

23andMe Results
Genetic Testing for the Health Conscious Coffee Drinker

Later this year I will be doing a post on the Ancestral side of the 23andMe report.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of 23andMe and get sweet referral money from those that sign up after following a link from this site. :)  

The Next Version of Critical MAS

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I plan to release a new version of this blog sometime in June. Some ideas I have so far include:

  1. New theme. The current theme I am using hasn’t been updated in a long time and unsupported themes can be problematic.
  2. Better typography. Although I like the fonts on this site better than 95% of all sites, I still think they can be more readable.
  3. Slightly wider content area. I’d like to start adding 640 pixel width images to posts without having them cramp up.
  4. Mobile. I had an OK mobile theme for a long time, then I tested a mobile app solution that ended up not working for me. When I tried to roll back to the older mobile theme, it wouldn’t work. The new theme will be Responsive, meaning one design to fit itself to a wide range of devices from monitors to tablets to phones.
  5. Better search engine. I’ll be deploying a site search engine that will not only search posts, it will also search user comments. 99% of blogs don’t have this capability. I’ll also be able to weigh content, so better posts appear higher than newer posts in the search results.
  6. A little bit faster. This site usually moves pretty fast, but I’ll explore some ideas on increasing performance.

Any other ideas? What would you like to see improved on the next version of Critical MAS?

 

Critical MAS Fitness Book Giveaway Contest

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I have 2 fitness books that I’d like to giveaway to one of my readers.

  1. Power to the People! : Russian Strength Training Secrets for Every American by Pavel Tsatsouline
  2. The Grip Master’s Manual by John Brookfield

Power to the People has a well worn cover and The Grip Master’s Manual is in great shape. To enter the contest:

  1. Be in the USA. I’m shipping these 2 books via USPS Media Mail. Sorry international readers. 
  2. Leave a comment listing your TOP 2-3 health and fitness sites. How you rate your TOP resources is up to you. It could be trust, knowledge or just entertaining. You can even plug your own blog or podcast.

There will only be one winner. The winner will be receiving both books.

The contest will close Saturday March 9, 2013 at 7 AM Pacific (was 9 AM, but I have to leave early that morning). I will use the random number generator at Random.org to decide which comment is the winner. I will email the winner requesting a mailing address. If the email bounces for any reason, I will get another random number and repeat the process.

If you are outside the USA, but still wish to list your TOP 2-3 health and fitness sites, please indicate that you are outside the USA in the comment, so I can pick a new number without sending you an email.

The Grip Master's Manual
The Grip Master’s Manual by John Brookfield

Power to the People! : Russian Strength Training Secrets for Every American
Power to the People! : Russian Strength Training Secrets for Every American by Pavel Tsatsouline

Goodbye Coffee Hero!

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Today was a good day. I sold the Coffee Hero web domains. Soon I’ll be transferring over the Facebook and Twitter accounts. Coffee Hero is a killer name and I have confidence that the guys that purchased it will put out a solid web entity in the future.

I spent a huge amount of time from 2009-2010 trying to build that site. It never took off. The web didn’t need another coffee e-zine or a Seattle coffee blog. One coffee website is enough for me. The good news is I got a nice chunk of change today and I can finally stop thinking about what I am going to do with those domains.

Photo by Kate Haskell

Chasing Down Site Performance Issues

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I’ve been spending the last week chasing down site performance issues. Every so often, usually in the morning the site starts hanging. At first I thought it was a WordPress plugin issue, so I went plugin by plugin with no benefit. BlueHost showed me a page that detailed when my site was being CPU throttled. After several more hours of investigation, I now believe it is being caused by a webcrawler called 80legs.

80legs has hit my site almost 50,000 times in the past 3 days. Actually less than 3 days. Some of the hits were multiple times per second. Does that qualify for a Denial of Service attack? I’ve reached out to the company and added a disallow rule on my robots file. Hopefully, this will get resolved in the next few days.

Telling the 80legs crawler to leave.

Why I Post Food Recipes

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I love cooking and then food blogging about what I made. As honorable as sharing my kitchen adventure is to others may be, I realized that my primary motivation is selfish. Whenever I take on a new dish, it usually involves looking at several recipes online and then based off my own likes, dislikes and equipment, coming up with my own variation. If my variation works, I document everything and take photos. Then I publish to this blog in the Recipe category. Now the next time I go to make the dish, I go to my own website without having to repeat the research I did the first time.

The recipe section of the site is my own version of the family recipes that used to reside on index cards. In cases where I don’t make any alternations, I might just take photos and provide a direct link to the source. This is also saving me time as I don’t need to go back to the search engine to locate the recipe that I already know I like. As great as Google Search may be, when it comes to recipes they favor larger sites with more cluttered design and recipes of unnecessary complexity.

I much prefer getting recipes from the independent blogger than some celebrity chef. There is less noise. The recipe is less likely to try an up sell me on something I don’t need. So when I search recipes online, I almost always jump down to about the 10th spot in the search results and start my research there.

In the outstanding book An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies, author Tyler Cowen goes into greater depth on why getting recipes from celebrity chefs is usually a bad idea. It is in the economic interest of a top chef not to make their dishes too easy to replicate. They tend to have more ingredients and steps than most. The more complex the recipe, the more likely something might go wrong and worse is you might not be able to figure out what caused the dish to turn out poorly. Simple recipes are better for learning and can often yield equal results in terms of quality. This is why I’ll favor an independent blogger like dishes and dishes over someone with a show on The Food Network.

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies
An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen

Another reason I post the recipes online is the instant feedback I get in comments. These tips and suggestions help me become a better cook at a faster pace. When my attempt at cooking pig uterus came out rubbery, Terri added an excellent comment guiding me in the correct direction the next time I make this dish. Even though I rarely will update older posts, that rule doesn’t extend to recipes. As I improve upon a dish, I will go back and make updates to those posts. In April 2012 I made quite a few changes to my July 2011 recipe for Dill and Caraway Sauerkraut.

If you are learning to cook, I highly recommend getting a camera and starting a blog. Use the free service offered by WordPress.com. Your blog will become your personal recipe drawer. Then sharing recipes with friends and family is as simple as emailing a link.

Removing the Readability Publisher Tool

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UPDATE: Readability has confirmed this bug exists in Internet Explorer. I’ve added back the plugin at their request so they can perform testing. 

UPDATE 2: Readability has fixed the bug. Yeah!

As a user I absolutely love the Readability browser plugin. I can go to any site that uses hideous typography and with a single click the page will magically convert into easy to read text. Readability is not the only application that makes text easy to read. Instapaper and Pocket also do a great job beautifying the web. I highly recommend using one of these services.

Publisher Woes

So now that my love letter to Readability as a user is over, I’m going to say why I’ve removed their publisher toolbar from the posts on this blog. It has a bug. I’ve reported this bug and provided screen shots. First they claimed they couldn’t reproduce it. Then they ignored me. If you do not have an account with Readability or you are not logged into Readability and you click the Read: Later button this is what happens.

The Later button turns to Saving and the Saving icon appears. 

Instead of loading the save page on Readability, the script redirects the user back to originating server where that page doesn’t exist. The user sees an error.

The code that performs this redirect is hosted on Readability. It is broken, I reported it, they ignored me. That is why I’ve removed it from this site. I was also planning to add it to INeedCoffee. That isn’t going to happen now. At this point, even if they fix it, I won’t use it. It slows page draws and the fonts on my sites are larger, darker and have more spacing than most. The print and mobile versions of this site aren’t bad either.

So if you miss having the Readability buttons on this site, please install Readability directly to your browser.

How Web Hosting Tech Support Works

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Last night this site was offline sporadically for an hour. I submitted a Support Ticket to my web host and waited. I don’t know why I even bother with the tickets, because I know how it is going to end before I even start typing. My ticket goes into a queue. By the time support gets around to my request, every thing is running fine. A number of things could have caused the problem, but they can never replicate the problem, because it is gone by the time they go to investigate.

Photo by tyle_r

Then I’ll get the email saying how there is no problem. A few days or weeks will go by and the same problem will play out all over again. Never once does any tech support member run some analysis on what was happening on their server during the period I reported the problem. Maybe we can learn something to prevent the next problem? That is a radical idea. It is 2012, they should have much better monitoring and forensics by now. But they don’t, so the customers keep sending in ghost stories of phantom problems that only they can see.

My other web host goes a step further. They tell me to go parsing through log files to determine how I screwed things up. Never mind the fact that my site ran perfectly fine on other hosts. It must be my problem. Always omitted from the discussion is the fact I’m paying for shared hosting, which means my site is just one of many on that server. Looking at just my log files, assuming I could even understand them, only provides a partial view of that server.

Airplanes have “black box” recorders that they use to figure out what caused a crash and how to prevent the next one. Web hosts need something similar. Maybe it already exists. If it does, the support representatives I get aren’t using them.

Spacing Out on Extra Spaces

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One year ago an article I read convinced me that one of my deepest beliefs was wrong. The article was Space Invaders: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period by Farhad Manjoo.

Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.

When I was in school, I had been taught to drop 2 spaces after every period, question mark and exclamation mark. In a world of monospace fonts, that might make readability better, but not for the vast majority of fonts, which aren’t monospaced. The Slate article really impacted me. I was convinced, so around June of last year I broke a lifetime habit of double tapping the space bar.

I Love Typography

Photo by kitsimons

Within a week of doing the single space, I could see how much nicer the fonts were lining up. Whenever I went back into the blog archives to collect a link, I’d cringe a little seeing all those extra spaces. Every now and then I’d hand edit the post and remove those extra spaces. The problem is this site has over 1700 posts. That could take forever.

A few weeks ago I was doing some housekeeping on this site and decided to do something programmatically about it. I wrote some queries to remove extra spaces out, but they didn’t work. After a lot of work, I determined that the ASCII codes for the first and second space after a sentence were different. Then I modified a stored procedure to clean the posts of these evil hidden spaces. Before running the query, I did several tests and it appeared to be solid code. So I ran it and it appeared to work. All those extra spaces from the December 2005 to June 2011 were gone.

All was not well though. I started seeing cases where words that should have been separated by spaces were now collapsed. And there was no rhyme or reason on where it happened. Last night I wrote I stored procedure to locate long words, with the thought that some of these long words were really pairs of words packed together. I found a bunch and I’m still finding more. I went from having yucky typography to having a number of spelling errors. I do have a backup, but I’m hesitant to roll back because far more posts were positively impacted than negatively.

This might take a while.

Comments About Comments

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This site recently passed a great milestone of having over 5,000 comments. I love the comments this site gets. I’ve gotten so many great ideas. Last year I added comments to my coffee site INeedCoffee. It was a disaster. Despite having ten times the traffic this site has – very few readers left comments and those that did added no value and were often spam. I ended up shutting down the comments. I may restore it to selected articles in the future, but not right now.

Photo by Premasagar Rose

I don’t comment on other blogs as much as I’d like to. Recently, I thought about the barriers that prevented me from adding a comment and came up with this list.

Why I Didn’t Comment on Your Blog

  1. No Option to Subscribe to Comments – This is the number one reason I won’t leave a comment. WordPress offers several plugins that manage it all for you. Google’s Blogspot offers a clumsy way to subscribe to comments, but it works. If I really like the site and they don’t offer a way to subscribe, I’ll send an email to the website owner requesting the feature. If it gets implemented I’ll become a more active reader and participant in the site, because I feel invested in their success. If my request gets ignored, I may stop reading the site altogether.
  2. CAPTCHA – I hate CAPTCHA. It often takes me multiple attempts to see those letters. There are far better ways to prevent SPAM that don’t annoy the reader. Blogspot sites are most guilty of this. And I hate Blogspot. I find it ironic that Google engineers are geniuses when it comes to filtering email spam, but are blithering idiots when it comes to comment spam.
  3. Force Me To Log In To Comment – If I have to sign up for account or use some authentication method that requires a form to fill out, I won’t leave a comment. As bad as DISQUS was at filtering SPAM, they have a great interface for authenticating users. If you are logged into Twitter or Facebook, you can click a single button to be authenticated without filling out a form. Meanwhile, Google is completely stupid on this point. Even though I’m logged into GMAIL, YouTube and other Google services, I am forcing to log into their Blogger service to leave a comment on Blogspot accounts. There is also a bug that if you can’t request to subscribe to comments until after you are authenticated. *BTW, I no longer report bugs to Google. I have a long history of them ignoring every bug request I’ve ever reported.
  4. Censor My Comment – Not “holding for moderation“, but outright censored. I’m always respectful and never combative in the comments I leave. Once I figure out that a site censors comments, they are dead to me. High Intensity Nation censored two of my comments. I am no longer a fan or supporter of that site.
  5. Too Many Comments – If a site is super popular and receives lots of comments, I’m less likely to comment for two reasons. One is that I feel that someone has probably already said what I’m thinking and the second is that I feel my contribution will get lost. It would be better to flesh out my idea over on my own blog.
  6. Comments Aren’t Maintained – If I see lots of spam in the comments or if the author of the article doesn’t respond to simple direct questions from their readers, then I won’t leave a comment.
  7. Comment Thread Has High Noise Factor – Look at the comment threads for the articles over on Yahoo! Sports or most investment forums for examples.
  8. Site Has Coding Errors – Maybe everything is right about the site, but one of the plugins looks like it is throwing an error. I’ll assume the comment system may have issues as well and leave. I once left a comment on a blog that errored out. I emailed the website owner the bug I was experiencing and I got an “LOL” response. I unsubscribed from the site and have never been back.
  9. Site Has Poor Typography – I’m a sucker for a clean user interface. If you use small gray fonts on a white background, I won’t comment. I can use the Readability plugin to make your site legible, but that plugin doesn’t clean up the comments, just the content.
  10. Author Doesn’t Ask For Specific Feedback – Sometimes I’ll read a great blog post and the only thing I can think to comment is “great job”. But that really isn’t enough to motivate me to comment. When the author closes with a few questions to extend discussion, I’m more likely to comment.
  11. Doesn’t Support Trackbacks – I am more likely to link to and engage in the comments of a site that supports Trackback links. Sites like FreeTheAnimal and PerfectHealthDiet have linked here and me to them. We all honor trackback links. Blogger and Blogspot sites do not support trackbacks. This one isn’t a deal breaker, but a nice to have.

Those are my reasons for not commenting. Did I miss anything?

The INeedCoffee Redesign is Live

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Way back in April 1999, I launched a coffee website for fans called INeedCoffee.com. This was before blogging or blogging software was available to everyone. So I hand coded my own content management software for the project, which I still use.

Today was a major milestone, as I released a long overdue redesign. Check it out. Tell me what you think. A mobile friendly version will be coming soon.

Latte Etching

Who is Attacking My Web Server?

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This week I noticed something very interesting. Whenever I get a fresh comment on the post Filing Fraud Charges Against XM Radio, it is usually followed by a barrage of SPAM comments. Of the almost 1700 posts on this blog, that is the one with the most comments. And almost three years later, the comments on that post are still coming. It seems I’m not the only one that got ripped off by Sirius XM Radio. If you are thinking about signing up for their service, browse the comments before you read your credit card number to their call center in India.

Hey!

Anyway, since the last comment on January 19th a single IP address 199.19.109.246 has been slamming me with SPAM on just that post. Now my filters are strong, so nothing got posted on the site. These requests are coming from Volume Drive out of Clarks Summit, PA. I’m not a security expert, but I was able to block their IP Address.

Maybe it a coincidence? I don’t know. What I do know is that post has been #1 on Google for “XM Fraud” for almost 3 years. I also know that bloggers will often disable comments on older posts if they start receiving too much SPAM. Well, I’m not. I’m leaving the comment section on that post open.

Creating a Search Engine Without Google’s Help

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I forgot to mention in December that I added a new article over on my coding site DigitalColony.com.

Writing Your Own Search Engine Using SQL Server

This details how I rewrote the search engine on INeedCoffee. Most websites these days use content management systems that already have their own built-in search functionality. This solution is for websites that run on IIS and have their content inside a SQL Server database. Like INeedCoffee.

It was surprisingly easy to create a smoking fast search engine that delivered relevant results. I can’t help but think of cooking analogies. That great meal at the restaurant often isn’t that difficult to replicate at home. Google is an amazing chef, but my home cooking is pretty awesome too!

hey!

Hey graffiti photo taken near the University of Washington

Is Critical MAS now Mobile Friendly?

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This morning I installed and configured the WordPress Mobile Pack plugin. It detects if the site is being viewed by a mobile device and returns a more friendly version of the site. I was able to test it using an iPod 4. With two exceptions, it appears to work great.

  1. Following the small link to comments using a mobile device returns the post without comments. However, using the larger ribbon button to access comments works.
  2. The Archive page doesn’t display correctly. Since that page is rarely accessed, I removed the link from the top.

Ancient Mobile Phone

This is me testing out the site. “h…t…t..p..colon…” ;)

If you have an Android or Windows mobile phone, can you test out the site and leave a comment? Thanks!

UPDATE: Testing has passed for iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Windows Phone 7.

The Website I Don’t Speak About

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In addition to this blog, I have a few other websites. The one I have stopped speaking about is DeepFitness.com. The reason is that as my understanding of fitness and nutrition has improved over the past few years, the more I dislike the content over there. The content is a collection of shared articles. Some of the articles are decent and some are just awful.

The purpose of DeepFitness from the start was to both promote fitness and make some ad revenue money. Well, it hardly makes any money and I now see many of the articles fail to promote good health. What I am proud of is the code base. Of all the web projects I’ve ever designed, it has the tightest code (ASP.NET, C#, SQL Server, Web Services). Many times I’ve been tempted to pull the plug on the site, but the code works so well that I can’t bring myself to do it. Until this week, that was the sole reason I kept this site running.

How do you improve the site? Updating 2,152 articles is not an option as it would take years to complete that project. Then a few days ago, I got an idea on how to make the content better without updating any articles. During my investigation of nutrition and fitness over the past few years I have read many great books. What I needed to do was expose the readers to those books. So using my Amazon Link Builder, I added some code that drops in large images of relevant books when an article is requested.

Example: The banner for Wheat Belly by Dr. Davis now gets inserted into some of the articles, such as 5 Tips To Losing Weight While Keeping Your Sanity. The article is drivel, but I’m certain the book is excellent. And if the reader connects with some of these great books then the goal of promoting fitness is achieved.

Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health
Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health by William Davis MD

Adding a Recipe Category

1 Reply

Up until this morning, I had been placing all my recipes into the Nutrition category. That kind of made it hard to find things, so I spun off 24 posts into their own category. And more recipes will be coming.

Critical MAS Recipes

The recipes are mostly Paleo/Primal or Nourishing Traditions inspired. If you are looking for a low-fat whole wheat vegan recipe, you came to the wrong site. :)

My kind of cupcakes: bacon, eggs, no grain, no sugar.

My Latest Articles on INeedCoffee

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If it seems my posting frequency has dropped in the last month, it is because I’ve been focusing more attention over on INeedCoffee. Here are 4 articles that I’ve added or updated.

Home Roasting Coffee in an Oven

Way back in 2000, I wrote two articles on oven roasting. One for the gas oven and one for the electric oven. Not only were the photos terrible (it was the Pixel Depression), but the content would have been better served on a single article. This rewrite combines the best from the older articles and adds updated instructions. It also includes new photos and a video.

Roasting Coffee in a Popcorn Popper

The text of this 2005 article was pretty good already, but it needed new photos. The cooling section was also updated. BTW, if you are thinking about home coffee roasting, the popcorn popper is a far better option than the oven.

roasting coffee

Stovetop Espresso Brewing Tutorial

My original plan was to just add new photos and text to the Cafe Cubano article, but I decided I didn’t want this brewing tutorial buried in that 1999 article. I have to come clean. I’ve been trash talking this brewing method for a decade. Although it is inferior to a real espresso machine, it is possible to make some good coffee with this brewer. While putting this article together, I gained some respect for the Bialetti.

Eva Solo Brewing Tutorial

This is the tutorial I’ve been meaning to post for a few years now. This is my favorite non-espresso brewing method. I love the Eva Solo. It is as rich as a french press and almost as clean as drip. Unlike vac-pots and pour-overs, it doesn’t require as much hands-on attention.

eva solo

If you like any of the content, it’d be cool if you linked to it or shared it via social networks. :)

Moving Away From CriticalMAS.com?

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Three years ago I reached out to my readers and asked about moving my blog away from CriticalMAS.com to MichaelAllenSmith.com. The response was overwhelmingly in favor of staying on CriticalMAS.com. I listened to you guys and stayed on CriticalMAS and although I like the name, a new problem has surfaced.

Google now “auto corrects” my domain name in their search box by adding an additional “s”. Then the search is executed and none of the results come from this site. So Google has deemed my domain name a misspelling. I could map both domains so no links ever break. I still prefer the shorter name.

CriticalMAS.com has been live since March 2000. I would really hate to destroy that legacy, but Google controls the Internet.

What to do? Your thoughts?

Getting Mauled by a Panda

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I was mauled by a panda. Not the panda you find at the zoo, but Google Panda.

Google Panda is the code name for the latest Google search engine algorithm. It is Google’s latest attempt at making their search engine results more relevant. Although it did not affect this site, it hammered my coffee site INeedCoffee. Google Panda caused a 40% drop in traffic. Other sites such as EZineArticles lost over 90% of their traffic.

Photo by Valerie

INeedCoffee has been around since April 1999. Granted it doesn’t post with the frequency of many other sites, but coffee is unlike other interests. A financial site might require multiple posts a day to stay relevant, whereas instructions on making a cup of french press coffee really don’t change from year to year. I wonder how much of the drop is based upon post frequency.

One thing I’ve learned about Google is they don’t respond to complaints, suggestions or even when you take the time to report bugs in their products. Reaching out to them is a waste of time. So what I am going to do? I am going to take the advice in this article and strive to make INeedCoffee a better site.

I have a list of ideas to improve INeedCoffee. The primary fix is going to be improving navigation. It is too hard to find specific articles on the site. I also plan to replace or remove the worst articles on the site. I’ll be sharing more details as I roll out the changes.

My technical site Digital Colony was also impacted. That seems fair since most of the articles are about technologies that have since been updated. Also, I discovered some sitemap issues which have since been resolved.

 

ASP.NET Web Hosting Endorsement

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Since 1998, I have had at least one domain hosted using Microsoft’s IIS web server. Last year I ended a multi-year relationship with one host when they were hacked on a Sunday and didn’t respond to my email for over 24 hours. I took a chance on a new host and have been extremely pleased. That host is WinHost.

WinHost offers ASP.NET and SQL Server hosting at a good price, but speed is the most important factor for me. Both INeedCoffee and Digital Colony are smoking fast. Each site frequently has sub 1 second page draws. INeedCoffee connects to a SQL Server database and Digital Colony uses MySQL.

WinHost ASP.NET Web Hosting

I’ve setup an affiliate program with WinHost. If you decide to order web hosting, click on the banner in this post (or the one in my About page) before you do. I get a little kick back. :)

A Word About WordPress

Although WinHost does an excellent job hosting WordPress, at this time I would not use any Microsoft IIS host for WordPress unless you need to run ASP.NET code. The reason is that many of the plugins do not work properly on IIS. I’m hoping that over time either I’ll discover better plugins or existing plugins will be fixed to run in IIS.

Top 10 Posts For 2010

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I see other bloggers doing an easy Top 10 list. Why not me? Here are the 10 most popular posts on Critical MAS written in 2010.

  1. 2010 Fremont Solstice Parade Photos
  2. Intermittent Fasting Improving Your Success Rate, A New Strategy
  3. Why I Am Not Renewing My Sirius XM Radio Subscription
  4. Four New Books That I Cant Wait To Read
  5. The Paleo Diet Is About To Get Huge Again
  6. If I Were Still a Vegetarian
  7. Bok Choy Kimchi Recipe
  8. Gary Taubes Why We Get Fat Lecture
  9. Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar and Survival
  10. Coffee Ice Cream Options in Seattle

By far the most popular post on this site is The Lovely Ladies of Texas? , which was posted over two years ago. It still gets insane traffic. In second place is a 2009 post titled How Mickey Rourke Gained 27 Pounds of Muscle For The Wrestler.

5 Years Later

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Five years and 10 days ago this blog was relaunched.

I decided that I would no longer post about the news of the day.

I would post about things in my life that I found interesting.

In order to keep the blog interesting, my life had to be interesting.

At first I explored San Diego and posted photos.

Then I started to travel and eventually I moved to Seattle.

For a few years I was heavily interested in real estate and finance.

In the past few years I have posted a lot about nutrition and fitness.

What is next? I really don’t know.

Blowing Up Coffee Hero …Again

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This morning I pulled the plug on Coffee Hero. Version two was more focused than the initial launch, but it bored me. I’d rather be over here discussing nutrition than over there posting about latest coffee shop in Seattle. There are so many blogs about Seattle coffee now. It has one fewer now. It’ll survive.

Here is a quote from the movie 8 1/2.

Destroying is better than creating when we’re not creating those few, truly necessary things.

Coffee Hero was never truly necessary. It is time to destroy it. I’ll be moving over my favorite posts and deleting the rest. If I get the urge to write about Seattle coffee, I will do it here. Broader coffee topics will go on INeedCoffee.

I did leave a teaser on the last post.

Will something non-blogging related surface on the Coffee Hero domain next year? Maybe.

Although there is a possibility that I will sell the domains — I own the .net and .org as well — I may release something new on the site. It may or may not be related to Seattle. It certainly won’t be a blog.

ASP.NET Site Performance Secrets

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This past summer Packt Publishing found my technical website Digital Colony and liked it enough to extend an invitation to be a technical editor for the book ASP.NET Site Performance Secrets. The book has just been published and my name is in it. :)

ASP.NET Site Performance Secrets
ASP.NET Site Performance Secrets is by Matt Perdeck.

This is my first experience with editing. I learned a lot and I hope my feedback was valuable to the publisher and author.

Some Blog Housekeeping

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Excuse the dust as I prepare to launch the new “Best Of” guides for Critical MAS. I’ll be slowly rolling these out in the coming weeks. I’m also preparing for a physical move, so posting may be sparse.

Other changes:

  • I removed the Support MAS page. That information is now on the About page.
  • I removed my affiliation with DreamHost. In good conscience, I can no longer recommend DreamHost as a web host. They have a killer control panel and responsive customer service. Unfortunately, they allocate trivial amounts of memory and processing to their accounts and use every crash as an opportunity to up-sell you on a dedicated server. They also do schedule maintenance during weekday business hours. Punks. I’ll be moving this site and Coffee Hero in early 2011.
  • During this cleanup, I lost my link list. I really hate maintaining this list. I know WordPress could have done this for me, but I stubbornly did it myself and now it is gone. If you link to me and want me to link to you, comment on this post and I’ll start the reconstruction.

Ideas on How to Find Posts on Critical MAS?

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Recently I’ve had trouble locating older posts. Considering that I was the one that wrote them, this isn’t good. This means the readers of this site are most likely having problems as well. This blog has an Archive page, which is broken down by month. Who looks for posts by month? I don’t. The Categories are now overflowing. Tags help, but they aren’t perfect.

The problem with blogs is that new posts are always deemed more important. This is fine for long time readers, but not for new ones. This site now has 1,300 posts and if it were a book it would be over 1,000 pages long. I need a way to highlight the “best of” Critical MAS.

One idea I have is creating a series of Guides. I don’t know if I like the term Guide, but some potential guide topics would include:

  • Intermittent Fasting
  • Cold Weather Exposure
  • Evolutionary Nutrition
  • Tales From the Glitter Gym
  • College
  • Urban Hiking
  • Roadside Photos
  • Investing Philosophy
  • Great Books

Am I missing any? Is this a good idea? Do you like the term Guide or is there something better I should use?

How Developers Can Increase Their PayPal Donations

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In the last year I have donated money to four developers via PayPal. Their code was of benefit to me and they had established a relationship with PayPal. Putting a few bucks in their tin was easy for me to do. Of the four developers, one did something that I deeply appreciated. He thanked me.

When we are out in public and we give money to tip jars or the open guitar case of a street musician, we get thanked either verbally or a smiling nod. This is polite behavior. If developers wish to increase their PayPal donations, I highly recommend thanking the people that voluntarily give you money. A simple thank you email takes no more than 30 seconds, but it lets that person know your appreciation.

thank you note for every language by woodleywonderworks

Earlier this year, I added a PayPal donation setup on DigitalColony.com. Of all my sites it is one where a donation system seems the most appropriate. Developers can cut-and-paste my code into their projects and bill their clients or employer. If they deem the code helpful, I wanted a way for them to tip me.

I’ve received 4 donations and I’ve sent each one a quick thank you email.

My email thank yous probably won’t increase the number of donations I get, but it may make that person feel better about donating to another developer. And you might be that developer. So I encourage all developers that accept PayPal donations to say thank you.

Portland Coffee Adventures

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My guide to the Portland, Oregon espresso scene is now finished. Head over to INeedCoffee if you want to read Portland Espresso Vacation. As if living in Seattle with all its wonderful coffee isn’t enough, we are fortunate to have Vancouver to our north and Portland to our south. Many coffee professionals cite these 3 cities as having the best coffee in North America, if not the world.

Technical Problems on the Blog

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This morning I installed and tested a new plugin. It worked fine, but I decided it didn’t look right on this site, so I uninstalled it. That act corrupted the blog and now the root home page no longer loads. The author of the plugin is working with me to help fix the problem.

This problem does not affect the newsletter, RSS feed or individual posts.

UPDATE ( 30 minutes later): All is fixed. The Internet is now blessing my site again with awesomeness! ;)

Facebook Won. I Surrender.

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I tried to go 30 days without connecting to Facebook. I failed. Besides being an agent of distraction, Facebook is the best contact management system ever created. I was receiving emails for events that required a response before September. And I got some new friend requests. It would be rude to leave them hanging for 3 more weeks. So I caved on my Distraction Diet and connected to Facebook.

I’ve been successful on turning off Twitter and the news sites, so this isn’t a total loss.

Facebook is still a distraction, but it is also essential. I’m thinking about doing a 1-day-a-week strategy or maybe two 15 minute blocks. I’m not sure yet.

MichaelAllenSmith.com Now Drinking Sprite

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Not the beverage.

Joe from ArtLung discovered a cool new feature in CSS called Sprites. Sprites allow the web developer to create a single master image and then load parts of that image based off instructions in the style sheet. Joe took what he learned and created an updated home page for my portal site. So instead of loading 11 different images (each an HTTP call), the site now loads a single image and the CSS file positions the appropriate section of the image accordingly.

MichaelAllenSmith.com

The entire page, including the roll-over images, comes from this single image file.

http://michaelallensmith.com/i/img/web-empire-sprite.png

Now for the glue. Here is the portion of the CSS file that loads the image for Coffee Hero and its mouse-over image.

a#CH { background-position: 0 -200px; width: 650px; height: 117px; }
a#CH:hover { background-position: 0 -327px; width: 650px; height: 117px; }

The regular Coffee Hero image slice is 200 pixels down on the main sprite image. It is 659 pixels wide and 117 pixels tall. The browser takes this instruction and it works. If you have no desire to count pixels, there are tools online to help you create your own Sprite, such as the CSS Sprite Generator.

For more detail on the optimization benefits, check out Optimize Your Web Site Using CSS Sprites.

Thanks Joe!

My First Dated Blog Post Was From July 1996

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I’m digging through some very old files right now. Although I had a personal website as far back as late 1995, I think I have uncovered my first dated content. Since the term blog had yet to be invented I don’t think this technically qualifies. Or does it? However, I do have a stamped date for these 2 posts. That date was July 21, 1996. Back then I had a Tributes & Slams page. That day I wrote one of each.

From the page Hall of Fame: THE MAS TRIBUTE Gallery:

AT&T and MCI 7/21/96

Yes, the two largest long distance phone companies are worthy of theTRIBUTE award. Do they call me and ask me to switch over while I’m eating? Yes they do. Do they whine about all the savings I’m going to experience? Yes they do.But, they pay me way more money to “switch over” than I ever spend in long distance. Bless their hearts!

Last fall I moved to Tampa and started withMCI.AT&T called me up and said they would give me$40 to switch over. Sounds good to me, I don’t even make long distance calls. A few months laterMCI calls and saidwe love you MAS and would like to give you$35 to come back. I saidI love you tooMCI and would be happy to come home.

A few months pass and thenAT&T calls. They are concerned that they have lost my business and would like us to get off on a fresh start.Me too I echoed.How fresh of a start do you want? Would$40 be fair to you MAS? Give me a hug you big lug!

Not one to throw in the towel,MCI called me and let me know thatmaybeAT&T had tricked me with their confusing promises and maybe I wasn’t seeing the savings. Sounds horrible, what should little ‘ole MAS do? Accept this$25 to switch back toMCI. Thank youMCI for looking out for MAS and making sure I don’t get tricked in the future.

Well………..AT&T it’s your move.

UPDATE! (7/26/96) – Just 1 week later AT&T calls up with a$15 check and free switch over. What a great country!

UPDATE2! (8/9/96) – Opened the mail today and MCI had a check made out for$15 for me. Is that beautiful or what? They aren’t even wasting my time with a phone call any more. Just cut a check and send it,I’ll switch!

From the page Walk in Shame: THE MAS SLAM Gallery:

WMTX and WUSA 1980′s Mix shows 7/21/96

“I knew the music of the 1980′s, the music of the 1980′s was a friend of mine, and WMTX/WUSA your shows are not representative of the good music of the 1980′s.”

When I first heard WMTX do an all 1980′s show I was ecstatic. Here I was just25 years old and already I was able to hear the sounds of“my day”. I always thought I would be40 before I would hear a show dedicated to the sounds of 1980′s.

To say I that I’m let down would be an under estimate, to say I’m angry would be more accurate. These shows decided to take the“classic rock” attitude and just play just thetop radio and video hits. Basically condense an entire decade into50 or so songs that get heavy rotation. Sure, every now and then a little known gem may sneak through, but that is very rare.

Also, I’m tired of hearing these on the air requests. The30 or so people that hear their voice on the radio may giggle with delight, but the20,000 other listeners would prefer to stay on the dance floor than hear about how your doing nothing in Plant City tonight.

And another thing! Any club DJ understands that songs need tocompliment each other. You don’t whip your listeners into a frenzy by playing Billy Idol’sRebel Yell and then throw on Billy Joel’sUptown Girl. Seems like common sense to me, but both of these shows are guilty of such crimes. Can these shows be saved? Yes, but they will need to follow the steps below:

  • Stop taking user requests on the air. If I want to hear listeners on a Friday night, I’ll switch over toLassiter on the AM dial.
  • Give the DJtotal power over the show. Trust me, the DJ’sknow a lot more about music than we do, IT’S THEIR JOB. The mix will suddenly be unpredictable and exciting.
  • Eliminate any songs from amust-play-every-week-or-we-all-die list. We don’t need to hear Robert PalmersAddicted To Love every show, do we?
  • Different versions of popular songs. Why play the samevanilla version of every song when many songs have really cool remixes that most of us have never heard. Have you ever heard the extended mix to Cyndi Lauper’sShe Bop?
  • Educate the listener. If the DJ plays some gem then tell the listeners who it was and when it came out. On the flip side, don’t break up a show to tell us that it was Michael Jackson that sangBillie Jean.
  • Make it atotal 80′s show. Play TV and movie sound clips from the 80′s. Maybe even do a few “time capsule” news reports.

    • So, until these shows treat the 1980′s with the respect they deserve I hear bySLAM them!

    I did write 4 Tributes and 3 Slams before July 21, 1996, but I don’t have a date for them. They weren’t that good anyway.

    DC Medfly

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    This morning I went looking through some old backup files and I uncovered my home page from my early days in DC. For some reason I traded the named CriticalMAS for DC Medfly between mid 1998 and early 2000. Here is a blast from the past.

    The DC Medfly just flew in from the Tampa Bay area. While in Florida, the DC Medfly (then known as Critical MAS Tampa Bay’s Digital Informant) provided local information via radio scheduling and coffee house guides. The site also featured a few satire pages that poked fun at the South Tampa powerful, elderly drivers, and the un loveable Canadian tourists. The guides are gone, but the satire pages have been moved to this site for archival purposes.

    Over time this site will present a more DC feel. Will a new radio guide appear? Maybe. Will a new coffee house guide be developed? Doubtful. Will the infamous Tributes & Slams get resurrected? No. New satire? Most certainly, but give me a few months to meet my new neighbors.

    12 year old pixels. Kind of feels like Antiques Roadshow for the internet. :)

    Internal Renovations on INeedCoffee

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    With over 11 years of content, not every article on INeedCoffee is good. In fact, there are a handful of articles that are terrible. Some are outdated. Many need to be edited and most could benefit with higher quality photos. Fixing it all is going to be a lot of work.

    Instead of changing the layout, font or navigation for INeedCoffee, I am taking another approach. I’m going to replace the boards that I see as rotten with brand new boards. A little internal renovation. There are several articles that make me cringe when I see them. It is not as simple as just removing them either. Many of these bad articles actually get decent traffic. Redirects aren’t the cleanest solution. I could rewrite a better article and then hope over time that the user finds the new one. My experience with the french press articles on INeedCoffee tells me that doesn’t happen. Google likes the oldest one best.

    What to do? My solution is to do a Reverse Indiana Jones. Remember in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy replaced the Golden Idol with a bag of sand? I plan to go through INeedCoffee replacing the worst articles with better ones. No links will break and hopefully the users will find an article that meets their needs better than the one being replaced.

    What articles are candidates for replacing?

    1. Anything that is a reprint.
    2. Articles with embedded links to commercial sites.
    3. Content that is poorly written or inaccurate.
    4. Missing or terrible photos.

    I’ve replaced four articles already. I’ve got a lot more work to do.

    Going Forward With DeepFitness

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    After fixing the branding issues with this blog and Coffee Hero, I knew that the next site that needed to be addressed was DeepFitness.com. The site has been running since 2004 and has the most inconsistent traffic of any site I’ve ever developed. The site would get impressive traffic for a few months and then it would all go away for a longer period only to return again. Great articles would get no traction, whereas several mediocre ones did well.

    I was seriously ready to pull the plug on the site when the hosting renewal came up in mid July. Besides the odd traffic patterns, the site had three major problems.

    1. Out-Dated User Interface – The layout and fonts inspired no trust with the readers. Despite only having one ad per page, it just looked shady.
    2. No Major Navigation – Tags are a useful tool for drilling down onto specific topics, however the site lacked top level Categories. The result was there was too much internal linking.
    3. Poor Content – Many of the articles are poorly written and some are just awful. I was often embarrassed to tell my own friends about the site.

    Despite these issues, it was decided to give DeepFitness one more chance. The plan going forward would need to address those three major issues. Here is the plan:

    1. Better U/I – I’ve already increased and darkened the font. The layout is wider. The articles are in the left major column. Navigational links are now in the right column. Things are much easier on the eyes. There will be more changes on the right column later. It needs to have that friendly toolbox look, like this site has!
    2. Categories – Behind the scenes I updated the code and database to provide Category support. The next step is getting the 2,300 articles mapped to one of eight categories. When that is complete, I’ll add the category navigation code and links to the site and rebuild the sitemap.
    3. Delete the Worst Articles – On deeper analysis I discovered that not the articles are bad. In fact, most have some merit. However, about 5-10% of the articles are just terrible. Those articles will be removed.

    When will this all be completed? I wish I could say July 22nd, but my gut is telling me it will be closer to September 1st.

    Coffee Hero is Back!

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    This morning I relaunched the Coffee Hero website. I believe that I solved the branding problems that I discussed in the post The Lessons Learned From One Year of Coffee Hero. Coffee Hero needed a clear mission that was distinct from INeedCoffee. Taking time off made me realize that the distinction was Seattle.

    Coffee Hero is a guide to celebrate the amazing coffee culture found in Seattle, Washington.

    The new About Coffee Hero page makes it clear who I am and what the site is about.

    I am 100% independent. I do not work for any coffee business and never have. Since 1999 I have been publishing the coffee website INeedCoffee. That site is for fans of coffee to celebrate their favorite beverage. Coffee Hero puts a local spin on the quest for great coffee. The Seattle coffee scene is large enough to justify its own website.

    The new tag-line is Seattle’s Independent Coffee Blog. It is all about Seattle now. All other coffee content will go to INeedCoffee. There are other Seattle coffee websites being run by businesses and industry employees. Coffee Hero will fill the role of the uber coffee fan that doesn’t have the patience to camp out on Twitter all day.

    If you live in Seattle and enjoy the coffee scene, check out Coffee Hero!

    Welcome to the New Critical MAS

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    After dealing with the branding problems with Coffee Hero, a friend pointed out that this blog had major problems as well. It was too confusing. The blog title MAS o Menos had nothing to do with the site. There was a photo of a kid at the top, but the site had nothing to do with kids or even me as a little kid. It was a blog, but it lacked a personality or theme to connect the various topics. I also started to despise the look, since it was the same theme I used on Coffee Hero.

    The first change I made was renaming the blog. It is now called Critical MAS to match the domain name. MAS o Menos means “more or less” in Spanish. Since the site isn’t in Spanish, using the domain name is much clearer. I also made it clear that MAS = Michael Allen Smith.

    The second change was a new theme. A fresh coat of pixel paint is always nice. :)

    Full view of the background, which is an HDR photo of Seattle by bonacheladas.

    During the redesign, I thought about adding the best of the early blog posts (2000-2004) to the site. I have over 1,200 blog posts on the Blogger server, which aren’t public. Well, I should say I HAD over 1,200 posts. After reading them, I came to the conclusion that they were awful. They were too negative, too dated and poorly researched. I deleted them all.

    I hope you like the new Critical MAS and if you have any ideas to help me with my branding, please leave a comment. I am also testing a new SPAM blocker that no longer requires you to do a math problem.

    Design Inspires Content

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    Since I pulled the plug on Coffee Hero, I have noticed that I am writing less here on CriticalMAS. It should have had no effect, but it has. I think the reason is that both sites use the PressRow theme. When they were both humming along, all was well. Now that Coffee Hero is rusting on the digital front lawn, it kind of makes this site look bad.

    Whenever I’ve run out of motivation on a website, the root cause is almost always that the design is lacking inspiration. I need a new look for this site. Design inspires content. A new design will be coming soon.

    Seattle December 2009

    That Time I Got a Cease and Desist From Starbucks

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    This post has been moved from Coffee Hero. It was originally written on July 25, 2009.

    With all the talk about the new Starbucks location opening up that will serve alcoholic drinks, I think this story is relevant.

    Way back in 2001, INeedCoffee published a collection of Espresso Martini recipes. One drink recipe used a Starbucks trademarked name in part of the title. Their lawyers discovered the page two years later and I was ordered to make changes.

    I’m not going to spell out the drink, but I think you know what I’m talking about. For the purposes of this post, I’ll substitute the word CRAPPUCCINO for the real beverage name. I complied with their request by renaming the recipe Just like a –frozen iced espresso-based beverage–!

    Here is part of the blog I wrote on July 21, 2003.

    Even though I’m not supposed to share the contents of this letter, here is a portion that made me laugh.

    We are concerned that this portion of your Web site may leave consumers with the false impression that any coffee and ice blended beverage, regardless of its source, complies with the stringent quality control standards that are applied to genuine CRAPPUCCINO beverages.

    This is funny for two reasons. First, what moron could possibly mistake a vodka and Bailey’s based drink for a CRAPPUCCINO? Imagine some yokel telling a barista that they didn’t put enough liquor in their drink. A CRAPPUCCINO has to have vodka in it, I read it on the Internet! The second reason this is funny is the phrase ‘stringent quality control.’ Our recipe used fresh homeroasted espresso made from a custom blend by Tom of SweetMarias. A CRAPPUCCINO uses stale over-roasted drip coffee which is masked in flavor by massive amounts of sugar. When it comes to quality control, we’ve got them beat.

    I wonder what Charbucks is going to do on August 1st when we release our own better version of the CRAPPUCCINO recipe?

    On August 1, 2003, we did release a reverse engineered version of their CRAPPUCCINO called An Espresso Based Frozen Drink Recipe. Since we didn’t violate any trademarks, we never again heard from their attorneys.

    A Starbucks concern in 2003 was not having their customers believe they were serving alcohol. Now they have a new concept store where they just applied to sell beer and wine. I find this amusing.

    The Lessons Learned From One Year of Coffee Hero

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    On March 24th, I announced to Coffee Hero readers that the site was going away for now. Although I touched on this in the post Rebooting Coffee Hero?, I’ve had more time to think about why the Coffee Hero site failed to be as successful as I had hoped. Here are the reasons I came up with.

    1. No clear distinction between what belonged on INeedCoffee and what belonged on Coffee Hero. Later I would use length of article as a metric, but it was an after thought.
    2. I spent way too much time on Flickr uploading and tagging images. Adding links back to articles was almost a complete waste of time. Flickr users just want to look at pictures. They have almost no desire to read articles to learn more about those photos.
    3. Topics were too haphazard. One post would be about an episode of the TV show Dirty Jobs. Another would be about drinking coffee in Thailand. Then there would be some tips on buying a French Press. Although there were readers that found each of those topics interesting, there were few that found them all interesting. The site needed a clearer focus.
    4. Having 5 writers was great for generating content, but the site did a poor job of personalizing each of the contributors. I should have studied other blogs that use a handful of contributors and how they solve that problem.
    5. Maybe the most important reason was the lack of a true HERO. The writing voice would jump from personal to “just the facts”. Who was the HERO and how has that title been earned? A year later I look back at all the posts and I can’t find the HERO. I’m sure many readers that had seconds to decide if the website was relevant felt the same way.

    Unless someone wants to give me a fistful of money for the domain, Coffee Hero will return at some point. A version 2.0 will only surface after I have come up with a plan to incorporate the lessons learned above.

    Rebooting Coffee Hero?

    3 Replies

    It was this time last year that I decided to freeze INeedCoffee and start a new coffee site called Coffee Hero. My stated goal was to start something fresh. From the post The Song Is Over, It’s All Behind Me:

    At some point this spring, I will launch a new coffee web site. It will just be me at first. I may post a few times a week or once a month. No promises. At some point, I may extend invitations to my favorite contributors from INeedCoffee should they wish to post. Or maybe I wont. No promises. It may or may not succeed. Lets find out.

    In the last year, I’ve spent probably close to a 1,000 hours building and promoting the Coffee Hero site. I wanted to do something different. With Coffee Hero, I wanted to extend the topic of coffee beyond the obvious. Writing reviews for crappy coffee has no appeal to me. Although I am proud of the content, I did receive some feedback a few months ago from a reader that stated he didn’t get the site. It was confusing.

    Was it confusing for others? Probably. Site statistics show that after a year, Coffee Hero gets less than 5% of the traffic of INeedCoffee. Most of site traffic goes to longer articles that would have received far more readership if they were on the INeedCoffee server.

    I am strongly considering dimming the lights on Coffee Hero, moving the best content over to INeedCoffee and returning to Coffee Hero with a completely new focus at a later date. The next 1,000 hours I would devote to Coffee Hero could probably be better spent on my other sites.

    Your thoughts?

    Interesting and Innovative Data Driven Websites?

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    I usually post about my own thoughts, but this time I want yours.

    The other day I was thinking about the evolution of how information is presented on the Internet. Fan pages became e-zines. E-zines became blogs. Then came podcasts and videocasts. Wikipedia popularized the Wiki format. Social networking succeeded with aggregation of social status information. The latest leap that I’ve seen that impresses me is Stack Overflow.

    Even though there are many forks in the evolution of data driven websites, the blog still appears to be the most popular. I love the blog model, but I see a few flaws with it.

    1. Too many blogs, too much content. John Mauldin recently stated it felt like he was drinking water from a fire hose.
    2. Older valuable content gets buried quickly.
    3. For a site to remain popular, it must keep posting, even if they have nothing new to say.

    My question to you is: have you seen any websites recently that have decided to do something different that impressed you? Share any links in the comments. Note that my SPAM filter will sometimes flag links in a comment as naughty, so it may take a little longer before it shows up.

    Windows 8 Wish List

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    I may be the only Windows user out here that was unimpressed with Windows 7. Sure it was pretty, but so far I have found it slightly less stable than VISTA. Windows 7 turned my working printer/scanner into a stand alone scanner that refuses to print. Oh well, time to discuss the future.

    Here is my Wish List for the next version of Windows.

    1. When I kill an application for hanging, don’t go searching for a solution. You’ve never found one. You never will. All you do is kill a minute of my life making me wait. And I am aware there is a 10 step instant kill method that geeks know about. Not interested. I want the ability to KILL INSTANTLY any application.
    2. A lean mean Windows Explorer. It has gotten way too bloated. This application should be rocking fast. It routinely hangs loading folders with lots of files.
    3. What happened with Adobe Flash? It used to work fine, but now it crashes frequently. The browser doesn’t matter. Flash became unstable once I went to Windows 7. If it is a Microsoft problem, fix it. If is an Adobe problem, deal with them directly on finding a solution.
    4. Unified volume control. I am so SICK of every web and desktop application having independent volume controls. Radio and TV don’t work that way. I want the operating system to calibrate the volumes for me and then I can adjust a single volume from my speakers.

    If you have something you wish to add to the Windows 8 wish list, add it in the comments. I know at least one person inside Microsoft will be reading it.

    An Observation About Quality Content and Advertising Revenue

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    I’m sure others have had this same observation, so I doubt I’m the first to point this out. The Internet is funded in a large part via advertising. No shocker there. Millions of websites pay for hosting from some advertising link revenue stream.

    What compels someone to click on an ad link? I already know the answer, but I’ll set up three scenarios. Let us assume you enter something into a search engine and you land on one of these three pages.

    1. The article delivers the information you wanted. The writing is crisp, detailed and maybe even engaging. The article may have a conversational feel or ring of authority. When you scan the page, the content is distinct and easy to read.
    2. The article seems somewhat relevant, but not exactly what you want. It is almost what you asked the search engine. It has a generic forced mechanical writing style. There is a ring of authority, but it is not conversational or if it is conversational it comes off as fake. Like the first example, the layout is professional and the content is not difficult to read.
    3. The article is buried in a design that is littered with obvious advertising. The page fails to earn any trust.

    Which page will earn more advertising revenue?

    The answer is usually #2. Why? Because the reader will pause to scan the article for information. The writing style won’t be compelling enough to actually read, so scanning for meaning will continue. At some point the reader will realize that the article is almost what they need, but not quite. Then they notice an ad link on the page that seems to be more relevant than the page itself and click it.

    Over time article #1 may earn decent revenue if enough people link to it and the search engines reward it with lots of traffic. The CTR (advertising click thru rate) will still be lower though. When people read quality content, they don’t go racing for the exits. Article #3 will just have people hitting the back button.

    My theory is not just a hunch, I’ve studied years worth of data for DeepFitness and INeedCoffee. The articles that are well written have higher traffic, but lower CTR. DeepFitness has some great articles and some embarrassingly bad ones. The bad ones pay the hosting fees, not the good ones.

    I’m not the only one that knows about this. Recently Wired published a story called The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model. In it a business model is detailed where companies bid out articles based on custom search strings. How much are the writers getting paid?

    The average writer earns $15 per article for pieces that top out at a few hundred words, and the average filmmaker about $20 per clip, paid weekly via PayPal. Demand also offers revenue sharing on some articles, though it can take months to reach even $15 in such payments. Other freelancers sign up for the chance to copyedit ($2.50 an article), fact-check ($1 an article), approve the quality of a film (25 to 50 cents a video), transcribe ($1 to $2 per video), or offer up their expertise to be quoted or filmed (free). Title proofers get 8 cents a headline.

    You won’t get quality content when everything gets commoditized and farmed out to the lowest bidder. But then again quality content rarely pays the bills. Sad.

    Where Have All the Comments Gone?

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    Even though the number of visitors to this site is pretty constant, I have noticed a drop off in comments. My first thought was the Math Captcha wasn’t working properly, but after many tests I can say it works like a champ. My second thought was my recent focus on travel, photos and fitness is less comment worthy. So I dusted off my SQL skills and uncovered this data.

    CategoryPostsCommentsRatio
    Books1251491.19
    Finance1294483.47
    Fitness1191851.55
    General2933311.13
    Nutrition811732.14
    Photos2311210.52
    Travel144930.65
    Web1561621.03

    The data suggests that readers are most likely to comment on a Finance post and least likely to comment on Travel and Photos.

    Amazon Thank You and Netrition

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    I want to thank all my readers that started their Amazon purchases on this site. I had a really good December and January, which helped me feel a little bit better about the $3,000 in car repairs I had between October and January. Even though the software developer in me has issues with Amazon, I do think they are a great company. I enjoy hearing that one of reviews helped connect someone with a good book.

    Another company that I have been a customer of for over ten years is Netrition.com. They have an outstanding selection of nutritional supplements at great prices. Like Amazon, they also have an affiliate program, which I signed up for. Even though I think most supplements are crap, there are a few that I still believe are highly effective (Vitamin D3, Creatine, Fish Oil, whey protein). There are a few more good ones, but those are the most important for me at this time.

    If you are looking for a place to order nutritional supplements, check out Netrition.com. I’ve added them to my About page. Thank you in advance.

    whey protein powder

    Optimum Nutrition NATURAL Whey Protein uses no aspartame or sucralose.

    903 Pages

    1 Reply

    If this blog were a novel, it would be approximately 903 pages. Using the TD WordCount plugin in for WordPress, I quickly learned that I had written 225,843 words over 1,147 active posts. Google Answers then sites several sources that list 250 words per page as the publishing standard. That works out to 903.4 pages!

    Note that number is just for posts since December 2005 and does not count the 1,247 posts from my previous blog (April 2000 – November 2004) which ran on this same domain.

    Photo saturated writing by tnarik

    Color Career Quiz

    5 Replies

    I just took the Color Career Counselor Quiz, which tries to match your color preference to a career path. My results are below. (h/t Caffination)

    BEST OCCUPATIONAL CATEGORY

    You’re a CREATOR

    Key Words: Nonconforming, Impulsive, Expressive, Romantic, Intuitive, Sensitive, and Emotional

    These original types place a high value on aesthetic qualities and have a great need for self-expression. They enjoy working independently, being creative, using their imagination, and constantly learning something new. Fields of interest are art, drama, music, and writing or places where they can express, assemble, or implement creative ideas.

    CREATOR OCCUPATIONS
    Suggested careers are Advertising Executive, Architect, Web Designer, Creative Director, Public Relations, Fine or Commercial Artist, Interior Decorator, Lawyer, Librarian, Musician, Reporter, Art Teacher, Broadcaster, Technical Writer, English Teacher, Architect, Photographer, Medical Illustrator, Corporate Trainer, Author, Editor, Landscape Architect, Exhibit Builder, and Package Designer.

    CREATOR WORKPLACES
    Consider workplaces where you can create and improve beauty and aesthetic qualities. Unstructured, flexible organizations that allow self-expression work best with your free-spirited nature.

    Suggested Creator workplaces are advertising, public relations, and interior decorating firms; artistic studios, theaters and concert halls; institutions that teach crafts, universities, music, and dance schools. Other workplaces to consider are art institutes, museums, libraries, and galleries.

    2nd BEST OCCUPATIONAL CATEGORY

    You’re an ORGANIZER

    Key Words: Self-Control, Practical, Self-Contained, Orderly, Systematic, Precise, and Accurate

    These conservative appearing, plotting-types enjoy organizing, data systems, accounting, detail, and accuracy. They often enjoy mathematics and data management activities such as accounting and investment management. Persistence and patience allows them to do detailed paperwork, operate office machines, write business reports, and make charts and graphs.

    Accurate?

    The Antidote to TMuscle’s Horrific User Design

    2 Replies

    I’m going to make this quick for those that already know. I have always hated the look of the fitness website TMuscle. Blinding gold text on black background may sell lots of worthless supplements, but it makes reading comprehension difficult. In the March post I Can See Clearly Now, The Glare is Gone, I thought I had solved the user interface problem by using bookmarklets. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn’t. They weren’t easy to edit and I ended up abandoning them.

    Today I discovered a FireFox plugin called Stylish that allows you to override the design when you visit a domain. You write the rules in simple CSS.

    After adding this block of code into a new User Style, my eyes were very happy.

    @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

    @-moz-document domain(“tmuscle.com”) {

    /* Clear the clutter */
    #mastHeadContainer, #indexCats, .mppHoriz,.discuss, #productBanners, .bottomLinks { display:none !important; }

    /* Make articles readable on white background */
    .articleFullWidth, .email, body, p, .ref
    {
    background-color:#FFFFFF !important;
    color:#000000 !important;
    }
    .email { font-style: italic !important}
    h1,h2 { color: navy !important;}
    .subtitleHeader, .header {color: green !important;}
    }

    Before:

    After:

    Not only did I clean up the typography, but I was able to remove the clutter at the top and bottom of the page. You’ll also notice that I was able to remove the supplement ad on the right column. I’ll buy their creatine to support the site, but their snake oil products are of no interest.

    Cleaning up horrific user designs could become a hobby. I’m thinking IMDB needs a good scrubbing. ;)

    What Google Should Have Done With Blogger FTP Accounts

    6 Replies

    Not that Google cares about what I think or even bugs I’ve found using their products, but I thought of a simple solution to their Blogger FTP problem. Google states they are abandoning support for FTP based Blogger accounts, because few people use them. The reality is their software architecture was flawed. Without getting technical, I am going explain how the Blogger FTP accounts worked and how they should have proceeded.

    When a blogger using the FTP account option published a new blog, Google would build the files on their server and then open an FTP connection and transfer static files to that blogger’s web host. The problem was that Google didn’t just send the file that was created or updated, they sent EVERY FILE. They had no way to know if your changes impacted other files, so they sent them all. If you have 30 posts, this isn’t a big deal. If you have 300, every update becomes a nightmare. Transfering MBs of files every time you add a comma is a painful experience to the blogger.

    I can only imagine what was happening at Google. God knows how many hundreds of thousands of bloggers were transferring hundreds of terabytes daily on their dime. Everyone loves free software until someone has to pay the bill.

    What Google should have down is create a desktop application version of Blogger. They already create one for Picasa and Google Earth. That would have offloaded the FTP activity to the user and off of Google’s servers. Then create a settings page that would allow the user to configure what gets published. And then publish those changes in the background. Desktop applications have an advantage over web applications when it comes to background processing. I don’t how many hours I wasted staring at the Blogger FTP status screen while I was ready to write a new paragraph. If you need inspiration, look at Microsoft’s Live Writer.

    There you go Google. Feel free to cut me a check for this face saving move. You lost a lot of goodwill this week with your announcement.

    The Case For Online Photo Storage

    2 Replies

    Every year I pay to have my photos stored with SmugMug and Flickr. I use SmugMug for my personal photos and Flickr for the coffee photos used on Coffee Hero and INeedCoffee. My SmugMug account has 9,831 photos. The Flickr site holds 2,762 photos.

    Let me quickly tell you my story of why I am glad I have remote photo backup.

    In October 2003, my house was evacuated as fires raced across San Diego. My house was spared, but I know others that lost everything. Every photo. During the fires, I went around emergency barricades with a friend so we could get to her photos before the fire came to her home. We risked our lives choking on smoke to save photos. I can not stress how important remote photo backup is.

    Many years ago I wrote my own code to manage my online photo galleries. Now I gladly outsource this role to SmugMug and Flickr. Why?

    1. Managing thousands of photos is a task better suited for a team of developers and not an individual.
    2. Photos have grown in size as cameras have added megapixels. This fills our hard drives quickly.
    3. Hard drives and computers do fail.
    4. SmugMug and Flickr backup all media and that backup is remote. You may be diligent about backing up to a remote drive or burning DVDs, but if you are a victim of fire or theft that won’t help you much. Both companies back up the photos, so I don’t have to it.

    Why SmugMug and Flickr? I am not a fan of any photo site that requires one to create an account to view someones photos. I am also not a fan of cluttered sites with ads that are pushing you to buy prints. There are 100% free sites out there, but free sites can’t stay free forever. They either end up charging users or they turn the user interface into an ad-cluttered visual nightmare. In some cases they just shutdown.

    Screenshot of my Elvis the Concert photo gallery on SmugMug.

    This leaves Flickr and SmugMug. I like both, but I prefer SmugMug. SmugMug has amazing customer support and great tools like Send To SmugMug and Album Fetcher. Send to SmugMug is a file uploader application that runs on your computer, which is similar to the Flickr Uploader. Album Fetcher allows you to pull down complete photo galleries after you’ve uploaded them.

    One thing Flickr does that annoys me is they embed “nofollow” into every outbound link. SmugMug doesn’t do this. What this means is that if I create a blog with a few photos and I decide to link to that blog, Flickr tells the search engines to explicitly NOT FOLLOW the link. They want the traffic for themselves. Now this isn’t a problem if the account were a free service, but Flickr Pro users pay for their accounts. Then Flickr has the balls to require link backs to Flickr when you go to embed photos, even if they are your own photos.

    SmugMug doesn’t play those games.

    My SmugMug referral code is:IzodUqeQndZYc It will save you $5 if you decide to open a new SmugMug account.

    Google Pulls Plug on Blogger FTP Accounts

    3 Replies

    Told ya. Two years ago in the post Death to Blogger, I said this about the Blogger FTP service.

    I’ve been with Blogger since April 2000 and I’ve finally had enough. It is clear that Google has no intention of repairing the code that runs the FTP accounts. It is slow and buggy.

    Today Google announced it will no longer support FTP accounts after March 26th. In other words, if you built a site using your own domain and the Blogger service, you now have less than 2 months to migrate to another tool or you will be forced to use Google as your web host. Some people have been with Blogger for a decade. This is going to suck for them. It took me weeks to move 2 years of blogs and update all the links and I’m good at this. The average Blogger user is about to experience some pain.

    I am fortunate that I moved this site to WordPress two years ago. However, DigitalColony.com still uses Blogger. It can’t be rolled into the Google Borg because I host code labs on my domain. Looks like I’ll be putting the Digital Colony rebuild on the front burner.

    Two years ago I told you Blogger sucked. I also warned you about BlogSpot. It is crappy code. Avoid it.

    Testing Out the Math Captcha

    5 Replies

    In the past 24 hours, this site has been getting hammered with SPAM from a certain country. I don’t know if it will work, but I’ve added a Math Captcha to the comment form. Hopefully the math isn’t too difficult. If it is, you can use a calculator. I’d rather have you add two numbers than strain your eyes trying to make out twisted letters.

    Send me an email if you have any problems with it.

    The Flood of Worthless Comments

    11 Replies

    I can’t recall when it started, but I’ve noticed a gradual increase in the number of worthless comments on my two blogs. A worthless comment is a non-specific comment, usually a compliment, posted by a spammer. The spammer then has a link back to their site. They are hoping the search engines and my readers will visit their site.

    If you have a blog, you already know what these spam comments look like. They aren’t the typical BUY, FREE or DISCOUNT spams that are easily filtered. They look like this:

    I was very pleased to find this site.I wanted to thank you for this great read!! I have enjoyed every little bit of it and I have you bookmarked to check out new stuff you post.

    This type of comment, especially from a stranger, adds nothing to the discussion. Because it is not overtly SPAM, my blog filter can’t decide if it is valid and I get an email asking me if I wish to approve it. This happens several times a day, which is more than real comments. Of course I reject everyone of these worthless comments, but it is an annoying waste of my time.

    I tried experimenting with a plugin that turned off comments after 60 days of posting. The logic is that real comments would be more attracted to recent posts. This had no effect and I’ve since turned it off. I really don’t want to add a CAPTCHA, nor do I know if it would be effective. I’m stumped.

    Have any of my fellow bloggers solved this problem?

    Tweaking the Sharpie Redesign of MichaelAllenSmith.com

    2 Replies

    Last April I redesigned my portal site using a piece of typing paper, a Sharpie pen and a scanner. It was a hit, but it had two problems. I insultingly referred to INeedCoffee as the “old” coffee site and it was too large. Unless you had a large desktop monitor, it required vertical scrolling to see the bottom inch.

    The 2010 touch up of MichaelAllenSmith.com is now 15% smaller and no longer uses the word “old” in front of INeedCoffee. You still need to scroll if you are on a netbook, but most desktop monitors should be able to see the bottom of the page now without scrolling.

    Defend Yourself Against Facebook’s Terms of Service

    2 Replies

    I think Facebook is an outstanding contact management tool, however I have a huge problem with the rights they claim in their Terms of Service.

    For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to yourprivacy andapplication settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

    This means Facebook can do whatever they want with any photo, video or I’m guessing blog post you upload to their server. They don’t need to tell you, credit you or compensate you. You surrender these rights when agree to the terms of using Facebook.

    Before you dismiss your little old photos as worthless, let me give you an example of one case I witnessed. One day last year I saw a photo of Paul from Caffination beside an ad for a router company. It said something on the lines that Paul suggests you would like this product. I contacted Paul. He was unaware his photo was being used in an advertisement and he received no compensation.

    What if you want to use Facebook to tell your friends about something you created? There are two ways that I have found that protect your intellectual property rights.

    Method 1: Post a link to whatever you created. This will direct traffic to your site or one of your choosing.

    The problem with Method 1 is anything with a link is filtered from Status Updates. Those links are only visible on the News Feed. There your link will get buried with all the quizzes and friend announcements and it doesn’t show up as your current status.

    Method 2: Create a Fan Page for your website. I have one for Coffee Hero and INeedCoffee. Whenever new content is posted to either site, I add a link just like in Method 1. Now this status update will only show up on the Pages section. This has the benefit of reaching out to Fans outside your Friends, but the disadvantage of not showing up on your Status Update.

    Now for the glue to connect the two. After posting a link to new content on your Fan Page, go to your personal page and create a new status referencing the Fan Page using the “@” symbol. Adding the @ symbol will build a link directly to your Fan Page. This update, unlike posting a link, will show up in the Status Update feed.

    Add link to blog post on Fan Page.

    Go to personal page and reference the Fan Page using the @ symbol.

    Your Fan Page will become a link inside your status update.

    In the example above, all photos are hosted on Flickr and protected by a Creative Commons license that I set. Those photos are embedded onto a blog post on my website of CoffeeHero.com. A link to that blog post is added to the Fan Page for Coffee Hero. Then I update my personal status and reference @Coffee Hero. Not a single photo, video or blog was uploaded to the Facebook server, yet I was able to alert Facebook Friends and Fans about the latte design photos.

    I don’t do this for every post. Maybe 2-3 times a month. Moving your content updates to a fan page a polite way of notinundating your friends withannouncementswhen they are already aware of your website.

    I understand Facebook needs to pay the bills, but they won’t be doing it using my unpaid labor.

    Web Goals for 2010

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    The primary focus of my web goals for 2009 was to redesign INeedCoffee. That never happened, because that goal changed intolaunching the new Coffee Hero website. Coffee Hero then became the clear focus for 2009. Also in 2009, MichaelAllenSmith.com got a redesign and DigitalColony now looks like Seattle instead of Southern California.

    What is in store for 2010? Here are my web goals for 2010 in their order of importance.

    DigitalColony.com

    This site was put on hold while I worked on my other sites. 2010 will the year I completely revamp the entire site. I hate Blogger and up until recently believed there weren’t any quality supported content management systems that met all my requirements and ran on an ASP.NET platform. Now, I have a solid lead that I think will work. I also need to make a 3rd version of the Amazon Link Builder. This site will be priority #1 for 2010.

    MichaelAllenSmith.com

    I love the Sharpie redesign which came out in April, but it needs some tweaking. Look for a new version this month. Where is my Sharpie?

    CoffeeHero.com

    I launched this site using the PressRow theme, because I wanted to focus on getting content before making it look pretty. Now that the site has some content, it will get a face lift.

    INeedCoffee.com

    There are some things I plan on coding for the back-end content management system that will improve how the site uses tags. From a user perspective, I don’t expect much to change.

    DeepFitness.com

    If I finish all the above projects, I will look into adding some more features for this site.

    CriticalMAS.com

    My only goal for this site is to just keep posting. There will be a minor photo gallery reorganization. Nothing that will impact this site directly though.

    Wrecking a Mini Van?

    2 Replies

    I woke up to find that I had wrecked a mini van in Iowa on the same day I was flying from Kuala Lumpur to bangkok. From the Daily Record of Central Iowa.

    On Dec. 8, a minivan driven by Michael Allen Smith, 714 E. Anson St., was travelling east on Edgebrook Drive approaching the curve when due to the surface conditions it went straight an struck an electrical box owned by Alliant Energy, 1911 E. Anson St. No injuries were reported. Smith was cited for violation-financial liability-accident. Damage to both the Smith minivan and the electrical box were estimated at $1,000 each.

    I’m just glad they didn’t find drugs or missing children in the van. :)

    Amazon’s Weak Defense

    1 Reply

    After lashing out at Amazon for moving the images to books used by Associates, I got a response. Here is their defense.

    It seems that you are using a Third party application to build your links. If that is the case you need to contact them about links breaking.

    We offer online automated link-generating tools in Associates Central for the exclusive use of our Associates.

    My response is, of course I’m using a 3rd party application to build my links. It is my application. I wrote it, because your crappy tools are incapable of generating valid XHTML code. I’ve even emailed you guys on how to fix your tools, but that fix was deemed to be a difficult task. Your words. Closing tags and lowercase are taught in beginner HTML classes these days.

    But that is beside the point. The data used to build my links came from the Amazon API. My application asks Amazon directly for that information. I wrote my tool to conform with all their security requirements to retrieve the data needed to build those links. The links point to image files on Amazon servers. How is that the problem of the link building tool? FACT: Amazon is moving images on their own server. The paths to those images come directly from the Amazon API.

    Here is what I am going to do to solve the problem. I am going to update the code on my Build Amazon Link With Image application. Since I can only be guaranteed that the image path is valid at the time I make the call, I will make a copy of the product image and host it on my server. Then the link built will point to the product on Amazon, but the image will be on my server. I am not happy with this solution, because it means that if the product media gets updated, my image file will be stale. But, I’d much rather have a stale image than a broken image link.

    Dear Amazon – Stop Being So Stupid

    1 Reply

    As a customer, I love Amazon. As an Associate that makes small referrals from reviews, I am sometimes amazed how stupid they can be at basic web stuff. Back in August I released a new version of my Amazon Image Link Builder, because they are incapable of writing tools that generate valid XHTML code. From the post Amazon Link With Image Tool Has Been Updated:

    ** I emailed Amazon requesting an XHTML tool and they responded:

    The W3 validator is very strict and constructing an HTML page which passes through it without any errors is quite a difficult task.

    They have a market cap of $36.7 Billion and find XHTML to be a difficult task.

    Having W3 valid code isn’t the end of the world. I’ve been told that Amazon developers have more important things to work on. Since I was able to knock out a tool superior to theirs in an afternoon, I disagree with that premise, but whatever. My real annoyance is the fact they are continually moving image URLs around. I’ll give you an example.

    In June I wrote a review of the book Primal Blueprint. In the review, I linked to an image of the book cover. The reader could click on the image of the book or the title and be directed to Amazon to learn more about the book or even make a purchase. Today I discovered that they changed the URL to that cover image. This isn’t the first time. My link checker pulled up 15 examples.

    I don’t want broken links on any of my websites. Amazon pulled this crap over a year ago. I made the fixes. I thought it was a one time thing. Nope. I sent them a piece of my mind today.

    I am SICK AND TIRED of you guys breaking the links to the images of the products that I review.

    My reviews have generated thousands of dollars in sales this year alone. Why you guys change the URL to image files of the books and DVDs makes no sense to me. You don’t break the links to the products.

    We are suppose to be partners. I have 15 posts that now have broken image links. I have to go back and get a new URL for each one. Do you guys want more referrals? STOP MOVING THE IMAGES!!

    Before someone jumps to Amazon’s defense about moving images, I’d like to cite usability expert and Internet pioneer Jakob Nielson. This is what he wrote back in March 1999 in the post URL as UI:

    Do not move pages around but keep them at the same URL: it is very annoying for authors of other sites when their links either stop working or turn into pointers to something different because the original page has been moved and replaced by something new.

    He specifically cites pages, but in a partner relationship, most would interpret the modern meaning to extend to other media. I certainly do. Amazon provides me with the images and links to help them sell products. I use them. They move the images, which alters the meaning of my work. A review with a broken image link appears sloppy and in my opinion is less likely to generate trust.

    Amazon is located here in Seattle. I know a few employees. When I talk to them, the impression I get is they just don’t care about the Associates program. It is just a minor part of the review picture for Amazon, so it gets less attention. Sad.

    WordPress 2.8.4 Woes

    2 Replies

    I’ve been using WordPress to run this website for a while now and I’ve been pleased with every version upgrade until 2.8.4. I’m having a problem that the “Update Post” and the “Publish” button freezes and I can’t save my recent changes. My only solution is to copy the text from the HTML tab into the clipboard, do a hard refresh (Control-R) and then paste the text back. At that point the buttons start working again. Thebehaviorisunpredictable. Sometimes it freezes after a minute, sometimes ten minutes, sometimes it doesn’t freeze. I use Chrome as my browser.

    As a code jockey, I can tell that the problem is with the client-side Javascript. I click a button, Javascript intercepts my request and doesn’t pass along my request to the Form Submit. So I am stuck frozen until I initiate a hard refresh. I’ve never had this problem until the most recent version of 2.8.4.

    I searched around to see if anyone else has this problem and turned up nothing. Maybe it is the Chrome browser? Is anyone else experiencing this problem?

    UPDATE (Oct 20, 2009): This is a Chrome problem. It does not occur in Internet Explorer.

    Giving 2 Bucks To Plugin Authors

    5 Replies

    This site and Coffee Hero run on WordPress. It is an open source (free) content management system. One of the things that makes WordPress great is the plugins. Plugins can extend your blog to do things not part of the WordPress installation. Plugins can be written and distributed by anyone. They are almost always for free, but the coders will sometimes ask for a smalldonationif you use their plugin and find it useful.

    Now that I am committed to WordPress, I want to support the best plugin writers. I figure a $2 tip is a nice thank you. So today I tipped 3 plugin authors $2 each for these 3 plugins.

    • All in One SEO Pack – Helps the search engines find my sites.
    • Google XML Sitemaps – Also helps the search engines and I use for debugging.
    • WP-Table Reloaded – A civilized way to manage tabular data in WordPress.

    If you have WordPress and a plugin that you adore, consider giving a few bucks to the author. With PayPal it is super easy to tip these coders.

    Photo Cute Tip Jar by Ann Althouse

    Who Do I Write This Blog For?

    4 Replies

    Every now and then someone will tell me what I should blog about. Someday I’ll explain why I detest the word should, but for now I’ll explain who the target audience is for MAS o Menos. Only after the target audience is defined can one understand why I rarely take suggestions for blog topics.

    Who do I write MAS o Menos for?

    1 – ME!!! – This is my story. There might be a post on a book I just read or a place I just visited. All things that I care to share, but all things that were interesting to me. My interests can and do change over time.

    Back in September 2000, I wrote a blog post about the Autobiographical aspect to blogging. Note that in 2000, I was refusing to use the term “blog” and instead used the term “web log”. I was such a rebel in my youth.

    [An autobiographical blog] only works is you live an interesting life. Most people don’t. Web logs about getting stuck in traffic or reformatting a hard drive are complete drivel. Meeting the President or totalling a car is far more interesting. If your life isn’t that exciting, perhaps developing a web log to document your days on Earth isn’t the best use of your time.

    So the primary function of this blog is to keep ME interested. I do and learn interesting things and share them here. If I don’t do or learn something interesting, then this blog falls apart. I’m not going to sit around taking personality quizzes just to have something to post. I have things to do.

    2- Readers that Comment – I love good comments that extend the discussion of the topic. In July, there was so many good comments on The Importance of College that I will most likely be creating a new post on that topic. I’ve had some really good comments in the past year. Thank you!

    3- Everyone Else – The anonymous majority is last. Does this mean I think valued commenters, many whom I’ve never even met, are a more important audience than friends and family that don’t comment? Absolutely.

    A Little Digital Colony History

    Leave a reply

    In April, I celebrated 10 years of my coffee site INeedCoffee.com. For some reason I thought that my second site DigitalColony.com had a September birthday. I was wrong. After digging through old backup discs, I have uncovered that it went live in May 1999. Happy belated birthday!

    Digital Colony 1999 Logo

    Digital Colony logo from 1999

    Last year I stopped adding new content (other than labs) so I could focus on the CoffeeHero project. Also, I hate Blogger and need to revamp the site with a better content management system. That project will have to wait until next year.

    Digital Colony business card 20000

    My business card from 2000 with the “no longer accurate” phone number smudged out.

    I’ve always loved the name Digital Colony. Other people seem to like it too. In the past decade, I’ve seen several companies launch (and fail) using the name Digital Colony. I own the dot-com. I also have the user-name digitalcolony for GMail, Flickr, YouTube,Digg, Delicious, Facebook, MySpace, Blip and 10 more that I can’t think of at this moment. Despite all this, new companies still launch (and fail) using the DigitalColony name. Can’t they think of an original name? Another one just launched this year. I’ve outlasted them all. I’ll outlast this one too. The DigitalColony.com domain is registered through 2018.

    Digital Colony 2004 logo

    The Digital Colony Scfi-Fi retro logo from 2004-2007.

    Where did the name come from? I found these sentences which I wrote back in 2000 that explain.

    I named the company Digital Colony because in many ways the Internet today is a lot like colony. When a colony is setup there is plenty of work to do. Digital Colony is here to get some of that work done and help the smaller businesses accomplish their web goals.

    That still rings true, except for the focus being on smaller businesses. I get more enjoyment when I am my own client.

    Egg Boiling Video

    4 Replies

    I wanted to test out the video capabilities of my new camera, so I made a video of hard boiling eggs. Once I had the video, I played around with some effects and then added a dance track underneath it. Maybe my next video will be making toast? I also have a recipe for ice cubes. :)

    For this video, I setup a VIMEO account.

    Hard Boiled Eggs – Iced Bath Method from Michael Allen Smith on Vimeo.

    Making hard boiled eggs using the iced bath method for easy peeling. Boil for 3 minutes. Turn off heat and let sit for 7 more minutes. Dump water, rinse eggs and then load them into a container of ice water. Let sit for 2 more minutes. Peel then eat.

    Background music is DJ DLG’s version of GNR’s Welcome to the Jungle.

    Amazon Link With Image Tool Has Been Updated

    1 Reply

    Because Amazon developers are incapable** of creating affiliate tools that are XHTML compliant, I built one two years ago. This morning I updated the tool to add some additional stores. I also added the ability to create text only links. If you have an Amazon Associate ID, feel free to use this tool.

    Build Amazon Link With Image

    Link to the page if you like it. If you REALLY LIKE it, consider buying me a Le Creuset. ;)

    Le Creuset Enameled Cast-Iron 1-1/4-Quart Precision Pour Saucepan with Cover, Flame
    Le Creuset Enameled Cast-Iron 1-1/4-Quart Precision Pour Saucepan with Cover, Flame

    ** I emailed Amazon requesting an XHTML tool and they responded:

    The W3 validator is very strict and constructing an HTML page which passes through it without any errors is quite a difficult task.

    They have a market cap of $36.7 Billion and find XHTML to be a difficult task.

    Useful Tool?

    Leave a reply

    In late May, I received an email from VW about some video that showed a coffee filter attached to the exhaust of a diesel. Silly me. I figured I received the email because VW knew I owned a VW diesel and that I had a coffee web site. After posting Diesel Flavored Coffee?, I saw another coffee site with the same video post. And then I saw another. And another. I now regret that post.

    Just a week or so ago I received an email from a fan of Coffee Hero that ran another coffee website that sold single cup brewers. I think single cup brewers are junk, but somehow I felt an obligation to help out a fan. I decided not to link to his site, but to interview him about single cup brewers. Sort of a convince the coffee snob piece. Just when I started working on the interview questions, I noticed one of the coffee blogs I follow did an entire post on his business. I canceled the interview. I have no desire to be an outlet for his press releases.

    Now I ran INeedCoffee for over 10 years and got commercial requests all the time. INeedCoffee had a clear policy. We only link to the sites of contributors. Contributors must submit an educational or entertaining piece related to coffee that is not commercial in nature. All requests for shared links would be deleted. It was an amazing success. Not only did INeedCoffee develop and build a good audience, but I saw the search engines reward our contributors websites as well.

    Coffee Hero is not INeedCoffee. One of the things I want to do is highlight other coffee related sources on the Internet. At the end of many of my posts is a Sources section. Apparently, this has made Coffee Hero an open target for sites looking to use bloggers to generate buzz about their websites.

    Today I saw coffee blog reviewing a coffee which is being sent to me in the mail. Seems he got his before I got mine. And I actually thought this company read my New Orleans coffee report and wanted to clear their name. Nope.

    These websites have everything to gain and little to lose. However, Coffee Hero can lose if it becomes a useful tool for promoting other websites. From the article Payola bloggers, FTC is watching you:

    The AP reports that the agency (FTC) is poised to go after bloggers and the companies that fund them if they dont disclose their payments and conflicts of interest.

    When I first read this story and another one that indicated Google would punish Payola bloggers, I knew it was unenforceable. However, Google is the judge, jury and executioner when it comes to web traffic. If it detected a pattern of links, it could condemn the entire group. So if coffee blogs started posting reviews of the ACME Espresso machine and they noticed a no disclosure on a few they could punish the entire group. So if Coffee Hero ends up reviewing a product the same month that some Payola bloggers do then I run the risk of having the site put on double secret probation.

    Even if all that doesn’t happen, any marketer that wants to pimp their wares could search back links to another product and see which sites are most likely to promote their product and which are most likely to give a positive review.

    What is a new coffee blog to do? I want to embrace the coffee world in a way INeedCoffee didn’t, yet I also don’t want to be used as an outlet for press releases.

    Post Count for MAS – 1 Year Later

    Leave a reply

    A year ago, I totaled up all my posts on various sites.

    MAS o Menos blog = 545

    INeedCoffee = 47

    Digital Colony = 74 (+ labs)

    Deep Fitness = 8

    I subtracted one for being a dulicate and came up with a total of 673. What is my updated count?

    • MAS o menos blog = 947
    • INeedCoffee = 48
    • Digital Colony = 74 (+labs)
    • Deep Fitness = 9
    • Coffee Hero = 81

    The new grand total (after subtracting the one duplicate) is 1185.

    T-Whatever

    Leave a reply

    There are two types of websites: sites that provide the reader value and those that don’t. And there are two types of web designs: those we like and those we don’t. I have noticed that sites that provide good value almost always follow good web design practices. Sites that have annoying user interfaces also tend to have limited value.

    If I come across a bad web design where I like the topic, I will seek out a replacement. On the rare cases where I can’t find a replacement, I will grit my teeth and head back to the site. For more than 10 years I’ve blinded myself reading the online Testosterone website. In a post I Can See Clearly Now The Glare is Gone, we covered ways to read the hazy yellow text on a black background using Javascript bookmarklets. This post isn’t going to rehash that topic. Instead I want to cover a little T-History. By my count, this site has had different 4 domain names in the past decade. Actually 5 if you count their female site Figure Athlete.

    Yes, they changed their domain name again. The last two times they did this, all my bookmarks broke. It appears they still work with the most recent change. The site is still a visual wreck. It is 2009 and they still don’t have tags. I love this site. It has some the best fitness and nutrition writers in the world. They deserve a better website to house their content.

    Start Your Shopping Here on CriticalMAS

    Leave a reply

    I added a shopping tab to the site. This gives you direct access to AMAZON, but more importantly, I get a small commission should you buy anything. Just use the search gadget on the Shop page. From there you go straight to AMAZON and pay the same price you normally would.

    Let us suppose you need something from AMAZON, you have 2 choices.

    • Go directly to AMAZON, I get a 0% commission.
    • Go directly to CRITICALMAS Shop Page, use the AMAZON search gadget and I get 4-6% commission on any purchases.

    Those earnings will be redirected into the site via new book reviews and hopefully a better camera.

    In addition to shopping on AMAZON, I was able to set up a $10 off web hosting coupon with DreamHost.com. Use the code DIGITALCOLONY (one word) and it will knock $10 off any hosting plan. You could pay a lot more for a more stable web host, but I like these guys because their control panel is the most user friendly I’ve ever seen. And I’ve had webhosting with numerous companies going back to 1995.

    MAS money

    The Seattle Times Likes Me

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    Yesterday I was interviewed by the Seattle Times Coffee City Blog. I wrote about it in the Coffee Hero post Seattle Times Coffee Blog Finds Coffee Hero. I’ve had a mixed record dealing with reporters in the past, so I’m always a little hesitant about doing interviews. Some of you may recall how the New York Times stole content from my site without giving me credit. In that post I detail what happened and I end with this conclusion.

    Why do we blog writers need to be validated by the real media? We dont. My goal is to create web sites and to gain audiences for those sites. If a reporter can help me achieve my goal, Ill help them with their story. And if my blog is good enough on its own to tell the story then pay me for it. Otherwise bug off.

    The Seattle Times story got everything correct and linked to my websites. Perfect. During the interview I learned the the reporter was also a graduate of The Ohio State University. Nice!

    Here is a scorecard of my dealings with the press.

    • St. Petersburg Times (1997-1998) – The radio reporter for the St. Pete Times stole content from my website for at least one radio column. I was never contacted. The reporter gave credit to my Internet Service Provider.
    • Tampa Tribune (1997) - Wrote up a nice profile of the Best websites in Tampa Bay. They included a screenshot of my Virgin Mary Kinison graphic. Very well done.
    • USA Today (2001) – Very professional and accurate. I got a nice photo of myself roasting coffee into the paper.
    • New York Times (2003) - Stole content from my website detailing the time I drove Presidential Motorcade. Had to wait 5 months to see story. Never gave credit to my site. Photo was published without credit.
    • Wall Street Journal (2003) – The reporter liked my story The Quest for Good Coffee in the Office and interviewed me. I believe a story was written for the online edition, which at that time could only be assessed via a paid subscription. Not sure what became of this.
    • San Diego Reader (2004) - Story about home coffee roasting got my occupation wrong, but otherwise was a good story.
    • San Francisco Chronicle (2004) – I helped a reporter on a home roasting story and I got a link to INeedCoffee. This was a positive experience.
    • LA Times (2004) - Rude reporter basically wanted to collect a paycheck copying the NY Times article and my website. I told her to bug off.
    • LA Times (2006) – Another rude reporter from the LA Times demanded that I contact him in the next 30 minutes to meet his deadline. Request denied.
    • Bloomberg (2006) – Published a story on a caffeine gene marker. They took some quotes from me and linked to my website. Very well done.
    • Seattle Times (2009) - Yesterday’s story mentioned above. Very well done.

    There were other smaller papers that I’ve forgotten about, but I would score my press experiences as 6positive, 4 negative and 1 neutral.

    Anyone Remember MySpace?

    1 Reply

    I went back to MySpace for the first time in months today. It is still a user interface disaster, but I was able to install a theme to make my MySpace page far less painful on the eyes. They have something called Profile 2.0, which gives users an option of cleaning up the hideous default look. I’m using the profile called Blue City.

    MAS MySpace Page

    If you have a MySpace page, I encourage you to setup one of the new easy-on-the-eyes profiles. We need to teach the children growing up what a clean user interface looks like.

    future-myspace

    A future world built by children that grew up using MySpace for their U/I inspiration.

    The Email Rant

    4 Replies

    It is time for a good old fashioned rant. This is not targeted at any one person. This rant is against the increasing trend of not being able to send a proper email response. If I sound like an old man, so be it. I received my first Internet email account in 1992 and –back in my day– people knew how to send and respond with clarity to emails.

    First I need to cover what is NOT email.

    1. Facebook Email is NOT Email – Don’t force me to log into Facebook to read and respond to an email. Facebook is a contact management tool, not my email client. My email address is visible on my Facebook Profile page – use it.
    2. Twitter Tweets Are NOT Email – Don’t send me an email via Twitter. I’m not going to read it. I’m not going to respond to it. Twitter is for people that can only think thoughts that are less than 140 characters. It is not for email. Twitter is also for whoring out links to your websites. ;)
    3. My Facebook Wall is NOT Email – If I have some item on my Facebook Wall (usually a link to one of my sites), feel free to comment as it is relevant to that item. If you want to contact me directly, don’t do it on my public Facebook Wall. Not only do I have to log in and connect to the Facebook site to read and respond, but 50 people have already read my message before I did.
    4. Texting is NOT Email – I understand location based texts. I don’t understand texts that are not important or can be handled in email. Every time I receive a Text message, AT&T dings me for 20 cents. Then I get to pay another 20 cents to respond to your nonsense? You just cost me 2 bananas at the grocery store. If isn’t location based or an emergency, send me an email. Or here is a radical idea – call me!
    5. IM is NOT Email – I know I’m wrong on this one, so I’m not going to defend my position that IM is brain rot. Everyone else is right and I’m too slow and dumb to get it. And Good Will Hunting was a good movie with a realistic plot and dialog. Right.

    Now that you know what is NOT email, here are tips to improve your email communication. This isn’t about being perfect, it is about being a little bit better. If every American improved their email communication by 10%, the productivity gains in this country would be so huge as to pull us out of the recession in a single quarter. I’m not holding my breath.

    1. Assume English is the readers 2nd language – More people on this planet speak English as a second language than as a first language. Write shorter sentences. Reduce your use of pronouns. If it means repeating the proper names several times, so be it. It reduces confusion and increases clarity. Line breaks between ideas. You aren’t writing a novel, you are writing an email. Clarity first.
    2. Different Topics Deserve Different Emails – Stop jamming emails with multiple threads into a single email.
    3. Write a Unique Descriptive Subject Line – I should have some idea what the email is about before I read it. Note that “Hello” is not a unique or descriptive subject line. In my inbox right now I have an email from a tea company with the subject line “E-mail”. I also have an email from Amazon with the subject line “Standard IAB Sizes for Amazon Widgets Now Available”. Night and day.
    4. Stop Forwarding Me Videos – I don’t watch them. I never do. What I do is look at the title of the video and then go to Google Video to search on it. Then I watch it online. I’m not risking a virus to watch some video that came off your aunts infected laptop. If I can’t find it online, then it probably sucked anyway. If you want to share some awesome video, search for it and then send the link. If it isn’t online, consider uploading it to a free site like YouTube and then sending the link. If that is too much effort, then the video probably sucked anyway.
    5. New Topic = New Email – This one drives me bonkers and everyone does it. They want to send a brand new email, but instead of going to the TO line of their email client, they find some ancient email and hit Reply and start up a new topic. They don’t even bother to change the subject line. Why is this person sending me economic data in an email titled Directions from the airport to my house? Stop it!
    6. Virus Warnings and Other Urban Legend Nonsense – If the end of the world is coming, I seriously doubt I’m gong to learn about it from your co-workers sister’s boyfriends next door neighbor that knows someone that overheard some other person talking about the end of times. Good data almost always comes from good sources. An email forwarded to you is not a good source. Don’t send it to me. Let me be blissfully ignorant to all the infected heroin needles buried in the ball pits at playgrounds.

    Feel free to tell me how right I am in the comments. If you disagree with anything here, send me a tweet. ;)

    UPDATE (May 28, 2010): Since this post, I have disabled texts on my cell phone and blocked the ability of others to write on my Facebook wall. Although I still think Twitter is brain rot, I acknowledge there are now tools to help facilitate better communication. Facebook email no longer bothers me as much, but I still prefer regular email for searching and archiving.

    My Long Web Nightmare Is About Over

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    Of all the website projects I have ever done, be they personally or professionally, there is nothing I’ve disliked more than managing the INeedCoffee Newsletter. Every month since April 1999, I’ve gone to my extranet, clicked a few buttons and then fired off a newsletter. Doesn’t sound too bad, does it?

    Creating a form to allow users to add or remove themselves from a database table is easy. Making sure they enter a valid email address is also easy. Writing code to send the newsletter is also easy. However, handling bounced emails is a pain. You see there are several reasons an email can bounce: over quota, user has a new email address, server issues or it has been tagged as SPAM. Every server has a different way of telling you the problem.

    Preventing stupid users from tagging the newsletter THEY SIGNED UP FOR as SPAM instead of just clicking the subscribe link is impossible. That happened all the time.

    Then there was the Earthlink users. They turned on SPAM filters that forced me to fill out a form for each sign up, because they didn’t add the newsletter email address to their OK list. Note: They were reminded to do this before they signed up. Then they turned around and tagged the newsletter as SPAM.

    About two years ago, almost every newsletter sent out was rejected as SPAM. After lots of investigation, I discovered my web host didn’t update some certificate authenticating the mail server. They fixed it, but the damage was done. Over 2,000 newsletters going out each month around the world and I have no clue on how many are making it to the recipients. I still get a large number of these each month.

    Diagnostic-Code: smtp;554 this mail is rejected by anti-spam system

    I’ve never sent a single SPAM from INeedCoffee, yet my server has been deemed guilty. And I don’t have the energy to chase down my accusers. Thanks to Google’s Feedburner, I won’t have to. My long web nightmare is about over. They will convert the INeedCoffee RSS feed into the new INeedCoffee Email Newsletter. I have the same setup here on CriticalMAS and over on Coffee Hero and Deep Fitness.

    On June 1st, I will send out the last INeedCoffee Newsletter from our server. Then I’m dropping all the code and tables associated with managing the email newsletter. I’m done. Let Feedburner deal with it.

    Help Me Solve The Page Rank Mystery

    2 Replies

    Coffee Hero has been live for about 50 days. Despite increasing traffic and an Alexa score which has dropped from 2.9 million to under 700,000, it still has a Google Page Rank of 0/10. I don’t expect a high Page Rank. Heck I’d settle for a 2/10, which is what MichaelAllenSmith.com has. And it only gets about 2 page views a day.

    Here is what I’ve done:

    • Ran RSS Feed Through Feedburner (a Google company)
    • Set up Google Analytics for site stats.
    • Built valid XML Sitemap.
    • Added Google AdSense to RSS Feed and Newsletter.
    • Registered site with Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Builder too.
    • Linked to the site from my higher PR sites such as INeedCoffee and Digital Colony.
    • Posted a few links on sites with high traffic that don’t use a rel=nofollow tag.
    • I’ve even registered the domain out 10 years.

    I’m stumped. I would ask Google directly, but I already know how non responsive they are. Some smart web people read this site. Got any ideas?

    MyBlogLog – Yet Another Social Networking Site

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    Yahoo! has its own version of FriendFeed. Here is MyBlogLog. Not sure I’ll ever use this site. My Web 2.0 strategy is to claim it, set it up and then walk away. Sort of like a digital version of the Vikings: Land, Pillage and then Leave. In the event the site benefits me, I’ll return to use it again. Most of these sites I never return to.

    Feel free to add me as a contact if you like. I did not include a link to my Facebook profile, because adding it required installing an application. That isn’t going to happen.

    UPDATE: MyBlogLog is gone.

    My Issues With Meetup.com

    10 Replies

    This post is for members, organizers and employees of Meetup.com. If that doesn’t describe you, you can stop reading now. Go look at this dog licking your monitor screen.

    Meetup.com is a way to get away from the computer and meet people in your community. The strength of Meetup is you meet around a hobby. For me it is primarily coffee.

    Since early this year I have taken over as the organizer for the Coffee Club of Seattle, which has about 600 members. Most of the events that I can organize have a limited number of slots that range between 10 and 25. You just can’t have 600 people crashing a coffee shop at the same time. There in lies the problem. We have far more members than slots, which means those that respond first get the slots. Those that don’t get to their email in time, never come and eventually move away from the group.

    I have come up with solutions to this problem and I have emailed my ideas to both Meetup and the Meetup development team. I’ve received supportive responses, dismissive responses and no responses. Here are the suggestions that I have sent to Meetup over the last year. NONE HAVE BEEN IMPLEMENTED.

    1. Sub-Groups – My group has 600 members. I need the ability to break the group into sub-groups and then send email invites to just that sub-group. Seattle is a large metro. I’d like to be able to tag members “eastside” “northside”, etc. Each group could create and set as many tags as they want. Maybe a chess group could tag members by level of play and then invite just the appropriate level. Some of the singles groups need ways to tag by age and sex.
    2. Target New Members – The strength of Meetup is finding new people. The weakness of the Email Invite is there is still no way to target new members. I would like the ability to email invite new members first and then throw it open to the regulars.
    3. Exclude No-Shows – When someone RSVP’s YES and then doesn’t come, it means that slot could have been taken by someone else. If someone does this a few times, then I don’t want them to receive an invite. Meetup’s only solution is to kick them out of the group. A bit harsh. Why not have an option on the email invite to exclude those with [X] no-shows? Let the organizer set [X] based off the event.
    4. Add the Day of the Week to All Email Invites – Why this suggestion was ignored is proof Meetup doesn’t care. Every email invite looks like this: When: May 21, 2009 7:30 PM. The first thing EVERY user then has to do is see WHAT DAY OF THE WEEK is May 21st? Every programming language has a method call to add DAY OF THE WEEK. This is the easiest fix. Add the !@#$% day of the week! When: THURSDAY May 21, 2009 7:30 PM.

    Request #1 does require some effort. Request #2 and #3 shouldn’t be hard to code. Request #4 could be done in 5 minutes. I’d settle for #2, #3 and #4.

    Meetup does have an API, which means a programmer can build an application around their method calls. Hey, I can program. I’ve got experience coding against APIs by Yahoo!, Amazon and a few others. Unfortunately, there is no method for sending the actual invite. I emailed the Meetup Development team requesting they expose this method and I never even got a return email.

    Photo Fail Rd by fireflythegreat

    Meetup is not a free service. The coffee group pays Meetup $144 a year. Facebook is a free service. I don’t want to move our group to Facebook, but if Meetup can’t be used to target new members in larger groups then it has failed its mission.

    Twitter Move In Progress

    1 Reply

    I just noticed that the name criticalmas was available on Twitter. So I’m packing my bags and moving there. This domain will now post to the criticalmas account. At some future date, I will tie the digitalcolony account to my digitalcolony.com domain.

    For those keeping Twitter score, here are my accounts:

    2009 Fremont Outdoor Movie Schedule

    9 Replies

    The 2009 Fremont Outdoor Movie schedule is now out. If you haven’t been to one of the Fremont Outdoor movies, they are a good time. The outdoor movies are held across the street from Theo’s Chocolate at 3400 Phinney Avenue North. This is also the same corner as Brouwers. It might be the happiest intersection in Seattle. ;)

    Movies start around sunset, but you need to get there early for a good seat. Bring a chair and something to eat. With the exception of Legally Blonde, it appears to be an excellent line-up. Although I might see more, I’ve bolded the movies I am most likely to attend.

    Saturday JUNE 27 – Edward Scissorhands IMDB=8.0

    Friday JULY 3 – Shaun of the Dead IMDB=8.0

    Saturday JULY 11 – Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure IMDB=6.8

    Saturday JULY 18 – Army of Darkness IMDB=7.6

    Saturday JULY 25 – Die Hard (Twisted Flick) IMDB=8.3

    Saturday August 1 – Legally Blonde IMDB=6.2

    Saturday August 8 – The Godfather IMDB=9.1

    Saturday August 15 – Some Like it Hot (Twisted Flick) IMDB=8.4

    Sunday August 16 – Bottle Shock IMDB=6.9

    Saturday August 22 – E.T. IMDB=7.9

    Saturday August 29 – Raiders of the Lost Ark IMDB=8.7

    Saturday September 12 – Animal House IMDB=7.6

    Twisted Flicks are kind of like Mystery Science 3000. The soundtrack is done by a Seattle improv comedy group. I’ve seen a few and they are pretty good.

    edward-scissorhands

    May 2009 INeedCoffee

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    I hand picked three golden oldies for the first issue of INeedCoffee without new content.

    * Coffee on the Road – Grand Circle
    by Michael Allen Smith
    ineedcoffee.com/03/grandcircle/

    Can one find espresso beauty while visiting the natural beauty of the Grand Canyon?

    ** Coffee Ice Cream
    by Rick Bartosh
    ineedcoffee.com/02/icecream/

    A recipe for coffee ice cream.

    ** Roasting with a Heat Gun: A Top-Down Approach
    by Jim Liedeka
    ineedcoffee.com/04/heatgun/

    Learn how to roast coffee using a heat gun. This is also known as the dog bowl method.

    whispering Hello to Twitter

    11 Replies

    After over 1,000 updates on Twitter, I said goodbye to the site last December. Too much noise, not enough signal. From Goodbye Twitter:

    Im sorry, but I dont care what you had to eat. Or that you just arrived to the office. Or that you are meeting with a vendor. And forgive me if I dont want to see some crappy photo you just took from your cell phone.

    I suppose one could always UNFOLLOW a friend with tedious posts. But that action is very public and could lead to hurt feelings. Most of my friends are very interesting – if you give them more than 140 characters. Almost none of them are at 140 or less.

    And:

    Maybe Ill change my mind someday. Anything is possible. But for now, it is too much noise and Im turning it off. Goodbye Twitter.

    Well, I changed my mind and I’m back on Twitter. Well kinda.

    I discovered a lot of people use Twitter instead of RSS Readers to be updated when new content appears on their favorite blogs. It would be foolish to have a blog without an RSS feed. As much as it pains me, Twitter is becoming an RSS feed replacement for many on the Internet. If you can’t beat em…

    Fortunately for me and my sanity, I found a WordPress plugin that automatically posts a link to each new blog entry on Twitter. It is called Feed2Tweet. I set one up for MAS o Menos and Coffee Hero. I also setup a DeepFitness account on Twitter. How that gets used is still to be determined.

    Twitter Accounts:

    Several years ago I went to the Street Scene music festival back when it was actually in downtown San Diego. I have no idea how many tens of thousands of people went to this event. It was crowded. During a performance by Blues Traveler, the lead singer started talking toward some guy sitting on the balcony of a building outside the festival. This guy was just sitting on a chair enjoying the show. He had a perfect view of the show and he didn’t have to buy a ticket or pay for parking. He had access to his own food and drink. If he got bored with the show, he didn’t need to fight his way out of the event, he could just go inside his condo.

    If it appears I’m not paying attention to your Tweets, it is because I’m the guy on the balcony, not the guy in front of the stage. ;)

    Hey Now, Hey Now, Don’t Dream It’s Over

    1 Reply

    I’ve decided to give Dreamhost another chance. I will use them to test new website ideas for the next year. These sites will not be fully accessible to the public. Since there will be a limited number of users (mostly just me), I won’t get upset if the server has the same stability problems it did on the Coffee Hero launch.

    Photo Temple of Forgiveness by Flickr user arno gourdol

    I really like their user control panel. I **hope** they impress me in the next year. We got off to a rocky start. They have a chance to make things right.

    UPDATE FEB 2011: DreamHost sucks. Stay away.

    MichaelAllenSmith – The Sharpie Redesign

    9 Replies

    Today I got the silly idea to hand draw a web page using a marker. So I took out a piece of paper, grabbed a Sharpie and scribbled out a redesign for MichaelAllenSmith.com. Then I scanned the ditto, chopped it up and added mouseover images with just a splash of color.

    I give you The Sharpie Redesign.

    Sharpie

    Believe it or not, it validates to XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

    UPDATE (4/16/2009): It now validates XHTML 1.0 Strict thanks to Joe at ArtLung.com.

    Leaving Las Vegas – Google Returns Queen Anne to Seattle

    2 Replies

    I just learned last night that Google has FINALLY fixed my bug report from back in December. From the post Google Thinks Queen Anne is in Las Vegas:

    I accidentally entered my zip code of 98109 and clicked the Map link and what do I see? Las Vegas. All the surrounding zip codes work fine. I discovered a bug with Google.

    It took three requests into the Borg to fix this problem, but it got fixed.

    98109-seattle

    To all the people living in the 98109 zip code: You’re Welcome!