The Last Post
This is the final post on CriticalMAS. I’ve received some difficult news, which I’ve shared in more detail over on Substack. From now on, I’ll be using Substack and Facebook for any future updates or...
Read more →Web
130 posts
No More Newsletter
1 comment
This blog no longer has an email newsletter. It seems odd to post this, since the people who signed up to receive the newsletter will not be alerted. The service that I used to send out newsletters...
Read more →More Fitness Calculators
3 comments
This is a follow-up to Vibe Coding Fitness Calculators. I added some more calculators for Potato Hack Fitness Calculators. 1. Body Fat Calculator (Navy Method) 2. Heart Rate Zones 3. One Rep Max I...
Read more →Feeding the AI Bots
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Cloudflare released a new feature that blocks AI bots from scraping your website. Will I turn it on? Absolutely, not. I want to feed the AI bots. I don't need to be compensated. This blog has always...
Read more →Vibe Coding Fitness Calculators
5 comments
For years, I've run into the same problem: I link to an online fitness calculator, and after a few years, the link stops working. I update it, but eventually, it breaks again, and the cycle repeats....
Read more →Archiving INeedCoffee
After 26 years, I decided to archive my main coffee site, INeedCoffee.com. I started it in April 1999 and actively posted new content until a few years ago. Each year, I would get my hosting bill...
Read more →Some Broken Link Housekeeping
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This blog and my coffee website both run broken link checkers. Whenever a link breaks, I step in to fix it. A few months ago, Mark Si$$on decided to remove EVERY SINGLE page from MarksDailyApple. He...
Read more →Ray Peat Died. Now What?
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Recently, nutritional pioneer Ray Peat died at the age of 86. I have several posts on this blog that reference his work. I'm not a strict follower, but I have borrowed some of his ideas. This post...
Read more →Latest Web Projects
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Eventually, I'll get around to putting out some new blogs. In the meantime, here are a few web projects I've been tinkering with. I added PaperCSS to my portal page. I like these style sheet...
Read more →My New Portal Page
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In my last post, I mentioned my portal site MichaelAllenSmith.com needed to be rewritten because it was an ugly version of my GitPage. I completed that task yesterday and did a few changes this...
Read more →Why am I Still Using WordPress if it is a Bloated Mess?
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For years I've been saying that WordPress is a bloated mess, but I still use it. Why? Each site is different and I'll go through the cases where I dumped WordPress, the cases where I kept it, and the...
Read more →Blogging Was Always Doomed to Fail
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Two years ago, I posted How Google Helped Kill the Indie Web and How It Can Bring It Back. I outlined in 700 words how Google could restore blogging popularity while taking on the social media...
Read more →Blog Posts and Word Count By Year
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I wrote a SQL query to see how many blog posts I published by year - excluding the current year.  \ Seven years ago, I removed around 750 blog posts that...
Read more →Getting Started in Blogging in 2022
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This is a follow-up to my 2019 post on this topic. Months after that post, I gave advice to two friends that wanted to get started blogging. One friend was successful and one wasn't. I will refer to...
Read more →Check out PotatoHack.com
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A few weekends ago, I completed Net Ninja's tutorial of Bootstrap 5 on YouTube. I learned just enough to make a website that isn't hideous. After I had a decent-looking potato portal, I hired an...
Read more →Long Live the Potato Hack!
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Unlike most bloggers, I run a broken link checker to alert me if any of my links break. Then I can repair the link, so if you as a reader click on a link here, you won't get an error. A week ago, I...
Read more →My Prediction About Email Newsletters Was Dead Wrong
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On this blog, in a comment from February 2015, I said: > It is 2015 and for the last few years, the message has been build the newsletter. Like every other web trend, this will get played out. There...
Read more →2021 Blog Housekeeping
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I made a few changes to the blog this year. The first thing I did was remove all the analytics. I had been using Google Analytics (with anonymized IP addresses) to see how much traffic I was getting....
Read more →The Box of Tapes
I haven't posted much this summer. The main reason is the topic of this post. As I've mentioned a few times, one of the projects that I am part of is the historical preservation of a radio show that...
Read more →Made in the Spirit of the Early Web
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I recently released a brand new version of my radio tribute site NeilRogers.org. This is what I added to the footer of the site. > 2012-2021 NeilRogers.org is a project maintained by Michael Allen...
Read more →Of Course, I Auto-Delete Old Tweets
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My personal Twitter account @CriticalMAS does not have any tweets older than 60 days. I use a service called TweetDelete that scrubs any tweet or like that is older than 2 months. I'm baffled why...
Read more →Newsletter Changes - Google Screws the Bloggers Again!
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UPDATE August 2025: Follow.it stopped working for this blog. I tried to fix things, but failed. Today, Google announced it will no longer be supporting the Email post option in Feedburner. This...
Read more →Is Facebook Calling Me Back?
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I quit Facebook in December 2018. I discussed my reasons in the post Leaving Facebook, which I will list below as well. However, since the lockdowns, I have been thinking about returning. Why Return?...
Read more →So Many Grammatical Issues
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I haven't posted anything new in almost two months, but behind the scenes, I have been working a lot on improving this blog. In 2017, I set up the Grammarly plugin. It is a godsend. It catches so...
Read more →Rewriting the Neil Rogers Website in Svelte
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One of the other websites that I maintain is neilrogers.org, which I discussed a little bit in the 2014 post My Tribute to Radio's Neil Rogers. You don't need to read that post. The short version is...
Read more →Reducing WordPress Executions (Battling the Bots) - Updated
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This is version 2 of this article, which was originally published on Jan 25, 2020. It has more updated information. One of the many complaints I have about WordPress is that it has become a magnet...
Read more →What Blogging in 2020 Feels Like
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Remember that scene in the movie Titanic (spoiler ahead) when the ship started going down? The passengers were racing to get off the ship, but the musicians accepted their fate, sat back down, and...
Read more →Please Stop Texting Me Emails
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I wrote most of this post over a year ago. It is not directed at any one person, but a general trend I am seeing. People, especially Millenials and Gen Z, are using text messages and message apps for...
Read more →My Battle With Meetup.com
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I have been a customer and user of Meetup.com going back to my San Diego days in the early 2000s. When I got to Seattle in 2007, I became a more active member. Most of my activity has been as an...
Read more →Getting Started in Blogging in 2019
9 comments
After my last post, My Blog Was Hacked and WordPress Sucks I received an email from a reader that I want to share and respond to. > What a clusterfck, Just think of the headaches that would create...
Read more →My Blog Was Hacked and WordPress Sucks
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This morning my blog was down. Some hackers uploaded scripts to mine crypto, which broke my WordPress install. With the help of SiteGround support, I was able to get the site up and running and free...
Read more →I've Made a Huge Mistake
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Well, not a huge mistake, but for me, a serious mistake. !I've made a huge mistake In May 2018, I sold the original domain for this blog (criticalmas.com) and set up shop here at criticalmas.org. At...
Read more →Bloggers Share a lot of the Blame of the Demise of the Independent Web
2 comments
In my previous post, I called out Google as playing a huge role in pushing users away from blogs and into the social media silos. But bloggers themselves are equally to blame for chasing users away....
Read more →How Google Helped Kill the Indie Web and How It Can Bring It Back
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My hope is that someone that works inside Google reads this post and shares it with their co-workers. Maybe this post can get a conversation going about where the web is heading next. In 2013, Google...
Read more →The Indie Web is Dead, Long Live the Indie Web
8 comments
Maybe as a result of breaking up with social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), I've become more nostalgic for earlier times. I have fond memories of the early pioneer spirit of the independent...
Read more →How to Save a Tweet as an Image With Google Chrome
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I discovered a neat trick with the Google Chrome browser that lets you take screenshots of all or part of a screen. Being able to save an image is something I need for Twitter. Although WordPress is...
Read more →Tackling Twitter - How I Cut My Daily Usage
Continuing with my series of becoming less distracted, this post will be about Twitter. To learn how I defeated Facebook and Instagram see these posts: - How I Quit Facebook (Tips you might use) - ...
Read more →Digital Minimalism - Focused and Isolated
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After quitting Facebook and uninstalling Instagram, I stumbled onto the book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. This book makes the case and advises on what I already knew. Social media, smartphones,...
Read more →I Started Something 20 Years Ago
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Today my coffee website INeedCoffee.com turns 20 years old. !ineedcoffee 20 comic I don't know of another active independent coffee blog on the Internet that has lasted as long. There are two in...
Read more →How I Broke the Instagram Habit Loop
5 comments
My last post was all about quitting Facebook. Now, I want to cover how I defeated my Instagram addiction. Unlike Facebook, Instagram actually brought me joy. It was everything that was once great...
Read more →How I Quit Facebook (Tips you might use)
Quitting Facebook in 2018 turned out to be easy for me, but I took several steps before I quit to make it much easier. Here is how I quit Facebook. #1 Define the Reasons You Want to Leave Write them...
Read more →Leaving Facebook Was Easy
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A little more than two months ago, I quit Facebook. I outlined my reasons in the post Leaving Facebook. I wasn't sure if I would be successful. I failed to go even 30 days without Facebook back when...
Read more →Leaving Facebook
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Yesterday I deactivated my Facebook account. I didn't tell anyone I was leaving. I just did. I always found those people annoying that would make some grand announcement about how they had to quit...
Read more →más MAS #2 and an Apology
3 comments
más MAS is a feature I added to the Critical MAS blog with links to things that I'm doing that are outside of this blog. The first edition was back in June. Medium Reduce Your WordPress Resource...
Read more →I'm Glad I Didn't Move this Blog to Medium
In May when I sold the domain that used to house this blog, I considered moving everything over to Medium.com. It would have been a lot of work. I decided against the move. I got some good comments...
Read more →How I Made $35 Last Year By Quitting Google
A year ago this week, Google fired James Dalmore. When I looked deeper into the story, it didn't sit well with me. It wasn't the firing that bothered me, it was how Google went to the press later to...
Read more →más MAS #1
más MAS is a new feature I'm adding to the Critical MAS blog. These will be links to things that I'm doing that are outside of this blog. In this first edition, I will catch up on the first half of...
Read more →Critical MAS Blog 3.0
1 comment
A few days ago, I tossed around a few ideas on the state of blogging in 2018 and possibly mixing things up here on Critical MAS. I've decided what to do, but before I get into that, I want to cover a...
Read more →The State of Blogging in 2018
15 comments
I'm putting this post together as a way to gather my thoughts on the current state of blogging. WordPress is a Bloated Mess I've been using WordPress now since 2007. I use it on 5 of my websites now....
Read more →Lift Slow - Getting Started with High Intensity Training
In my previous post, I mentioned the lack of resources for teaching the very basics of HIT and safe lifting to beginners. Most of what is available either assumes too much background knowledge or is...
Read more →Broken Link Checkers are an Essential Tool For Every Blogger
Let me give my fellow bloggers an easy win tip for their blog. Run a broken link checker on a regular basis. And then, fix those broken links! There are a number of reasons to make this a routine. 1....
Read more →An Issue With the Domain Sale I Did Not Forsee
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If you've never been in a negotiation to sell a domain, you may not know how it works. I've sold several domain names over the years an here is what typically happens. You'll receive a respectful but...
Read more →GDPR and Why I Decided to Kill Off My Newsletters
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You've probably received a lot of emails in the last month related to privacy policy updates. This was all in response to the GDPR privacy laws. I had zero interest in figuring out if my sites might...
Read more →CriticalMAS.org is my new home - I need to ask a favor
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In my last post, I mentioned that I was approached by a company to buy the domain that has hosted my personal website since March 2000. That domain was CriticalMAS.com. The offer I received was...
Read more →Important Blog Announcement for CriticalMAS
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I'm currently in negotiations with a party interested in buying the criticalmas.com domain. I was not looking to sell the domain. They approached me. All the content would still belong to me. They...
Read more →The Mad Libs Method of Creating Secure Passwords
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I have had this post sitting in my draft folder for many months half completed. This past weekend I saw that brownstudy.info posted Creating random passphrases for stronger passwords (link down...
Read more →Medium Take 2
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A year ago, I posted Medium and Blog Housekeeping. The plan was to republish some of my best posts there to gain new readers. After a few months, the stats told me that almost nobody was seeing my...
Read more →Kevin Smith is Keeping Interest Alive in the Potato Hack Diet
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I'm sure a few of you saw some stories last week that actor Kevin Smith is using an all-potato diet to lose some weight and improve his health. Kevin suffered a heart-health earlier this year and...
Read more →Changed My Mind Again - I'm Back
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Yeah, I said I was going away for good in March, but I'm back. I am not committing to regular blogging. If something of interest strikes me and I want to share, I'll publish something. That might...
Read more →Peace Out
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All the topics that I listed in Breaking CriticalMAS - A Return to Blogging? are now finished. In that post, I said: > I’d like to wrap up some of the topics I left open. At that point I may or may...
Read more →The Digital Graveyard of My Health and Fitness Mentors
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One of the projects I've been doing recently is going back into the archives, finding posts that have inaccurate information, and making 2017 updates where appropriate. I also run a broken link...
Read more →Now Are You Going to Setup a Password Manager?
6 comments
A few years ago I put out a series of posts on how to drastically increase your online security. Then I assembled that list on my Online Security page. The reason I wrote the series of posts is...
Read more →Medium and Blog Housekeeping
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I mentioned on my Breaking CriticalMAS post that I wanted to go back into my archives and delete posts I deemed worthless. I've since gotten a better idea. I'm going to add the best posts to the site...
Read more →Removing the Email Masking and Amazon Link Building Tools
Way back in 2002 I created a tool to mask your email address from bots that scan webpages and sell them to SPAMMERS. Then in 2009, I was unhappy with the Amazon Affiliate tools provided by Amazon, so...
Read more →Goodbye For Now
32 comments
Ten years ago this month I relaunched this blog. Before that I had a blog from 2000 to 2004. And before that I had various pre-blog personal pages going back to either late 1995 or early 1996. I'm...
Read more →Solving My Email Problem with Siteground
If you sent me an email in the last year and it bounced with a message saying that it was rejected for having a high probability of SPAM, I apologize. It is hard to chase down a problem when I don't...
Read more →Irresponsible Health Blogging
31 comments
I need some feedback. Something has been bothering me for a while now. It has to do with blogging about health and nutrition. When hobbyists like myself learn new information, change our views, and...
Read more →Back In Seattle and Other Updates
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Things have been slow on this site this summer. I spent July finishing up my commitments in California and then returned to Seattle a month ago. My Seattle room is still under construction, which is...
Read more →How to Send Email Newsletters to Your RSS Reader
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UPDATE April 2021: The service discussed in this post is no longer working. In my previous post How to Save RSS, I asked the RSS developers to create a newsletter reader. My wish was to redirect my...
Read more →How to Save RSS
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I love RSS. It is the best technology for reading content on the web. For those who do not know what RSS is, check out this 1 minute video. According to my research, RSS popularity began to decline...
Read more →Learn, Share, Convince
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I haven't been blogging as much this year and I wasn't sure why until recently. I wrapped up last year by stating that I was likely done posting on some topics. One was getting stronger in the gym...
Read more →Learning to Hate Driving Less
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When people ask me why I like Seattle so much more than California my first response is that I drive far less in Seattle. There are other reasons, but that always comes to mind first. Recently I did...
Read more →Securing My Email Inbox Part 2
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In my last post I used the Dashlane "Inbox Scan" tool to find any emails that I have archived that point to online accounts. Many of these emails also included the saved passwords. This means if...
Read more →Securing My Email Inbox
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I thought I was done posting about security, but I realized today after using a brand new service that I have a security leak. Before I go into what I found, I want to link to my other three posts...
Read more →Even More Security
9 comments
A few weeks ago I was getting ready to walk into a coffee shop, so I reached down to pull out my wallet. It wasn't there. In my rush to leave the house, I grabbed my old cell phone instead of my...
Read more →Make and Host Your Own Soundboard
2 comments
One of the projects I work on is the audio archive site for the late Miami radio host Neil Rogers, which I discussed in the post My Tribute to Radio's Neil Rogers. Like other radio shows, one of the...
Read more →Newsletter #3 - Eliminate
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Yesterday I sent out my 3rd newsletter, which I called Eliminate. For those that aren't signed up, here is a direct link to Newsletter #3: http://eepurl.com/bdt0cL After I sent the newsletter, I...
Read more →My Definition of a Good Blog Post
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This post is the conclusion of how I answered the questions raised in the post Feeling Destructive. Shortly after that post, I deleted 750 blog entries from this site. Mostly they were the type of...
Read more →Disposable Content
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Recently someone told me I should write coffee shop reviews. As with most advice prefaced with the word should, it was bad advice. I'll explain why later, but first a little history. I've had a...
Read more →Newsletter #2 - Chill
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Yesterday I sent off my 2nd newsletter, which I called Chill. I was very reluctant to start a newsletter. My thinking is that readers already have RSS, Twitter and can even have each post sent via...
Read more →My Initial Review of SiteGround Hosting (2014)
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I am very hesitant to ever endorse a web hosting company. The reason is the relationship usually starts out strong and then something happens and I am forced to move to another host. SiteGround is...
Read more →Stop Typography Inflammation With Stylish
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UPDATE March 2021: UserStyles was a great idea, but their server has either been super slow or down so many times since this post was written that I can no longer recommend this solution. This is a...
Read more →Podcasts I Listen To (2014)
4 comments
Another year, another list. I love podcasts. I love them more than I have hours in the day to listen to them. And because new shows or recommendations are coming at me faster than I can keep up, I...
Read more →Brewing Coffee With the Kalita Wave
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My latest coffee brewing tutorial is up on INeedCoffee. This one is for the Kalita Wave. Kalita Wave Coffee Brewing Tutorial !kalita wave pour brew In the next month, my plan is to replace the...
Read more →Newsletter #1 is Out
I finally got around to playing with the MailChimp application long enough to publish the 1st CriticalMAS newsletter. The theme was Summer of Moving. Not sure if I'll have a theme for every...
Read more →We Need a Browser Extension to Block Those Newsletter Pop-ups!
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I am so sick of the trend that every site have a newsletter and that they launch a pop-up window in your face 2 seconds after you visit their page. The pitch is that if you like what you see, you...
Read more →My Online Password Strategy (2014)
7 comments
My last post Scan, Encrypt, Store, Delete, Shred: Going Paperless! was about physically securing sensitive data in my home. The other half of a security plan is securing your online accounts. I am...
Read more →Stay Away From Site 5 Web Hosting (2014 Review)
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Yesterday I moved this blog off Site 5. My page draws were fast, the server was stable and with one exception the service was excellent. Why did I leave? Because my account exceeded their in house...
Read more →Always on the Run
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Looks like I will be forced to change web hosts again. Site 5 has turned out to be no better than the rest. In many ways they are worse. More on that in a future post. They claim I am exceeding their...
Read more →Blog Drafts I Never Finished
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Yesterday I deleted about 12 blog post drafts that had been piling up. Most were from early 2014 and late 2013, although one I started back in 2011. As someone who has been blogging since March 2000\...
Read more →Blogging and Permalinks
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This is a post about my thoughts regarding permalinks and blogging. My opinions are likely different than what you'll hear from an SEO "guru". I'm not an SEO "guru". I'm just a blogger that has been...
Read more →The Critical MAS Newsletter
7 comments
For the longest time, I have rejected the idea of having a newsletter for this site. There are too many spammy sites out there that have jumped on the "win the inbox" meme. But there are some people...
Read more →Masking Your Email Address
2 comments
This was originally written in May 2002. It was updated in February 2007, April 2014 and January 2017. Some of you are probably aware of spiders. They are these little programs that surf the internet...
Read more →Shutting Down the CriticalMAS Facebook Page
13 comments
I have some pretty strong opinions when it comes to the web, especially when it comes to owning and controlling your own work. In recent months I've become increasingly frustrated with Facebook. I...
Read more →Interview on Biohacks
This past weekend I got to meet and spend time with Stephan from Biohacks.net. We are both fans of each others blogs, so I was honored to be interviewed for his site. Interview with CriticalMAS
Read more →Where Seattle Pedestrians are Getting Hit
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In June, the Seattle PI put out the article "Where Seattle Walkers Get Hit". It pulled data across 3 years to show which were the most dangerous intersections. As someone who has been hit by a car in...
Read more →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 might be, I realized that my primary motivation is selfish. Whenever I take on a new...
Read more →How Web Hosting Tech Support Works
6 comments
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...
Read more →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...
Read more →Comments About Comments
7 comments
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...
Read more →Writing Your Own Search Engine Using SQL Server
5 comments
My coffee site, INeedCoffee, needed a better search engine. I had thrown some basic SQL together when the site was launched back in 1999. It did an OK job when the site didn’t have much content. Over...
Read more →Nicholas Carr - Information Overload 2011 Speech
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If you haven't read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and have concerns about the distracting nature of data overload, I highly recommend watching this 15-minute video. The presentation is titled The...
Read more →DreamHost and the Myth of Unlimited Domains
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DreamHost promotes unlimited domain web hosting for $8.95/month. It seemed like a sweet deal, so I signed up for it. The reality is that their offer is misleading. DreamHost offers 100 MB of...
Read more →Tales From the Glitter Gym Guide Now Up
Even though these posts get very few comments, people seem to love Tales From the Glitter Gym. I put them all together on a single page. Tales From the Glitter Gym Enjoy! !weighted pull up
Read more →The Problem With WordPress and How I Would Solve It
I use the WordPress content management system to publish this blog. As much as I love WP and think it is the best blogging software available, there is a problem. Sitting on top of the blogging...
Read more →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...
Read more →Facebook Won. I Surrender.
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...
Read more →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...
Read more →Design Inspires Content
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...
Read more →That Time I Got a Cease and Desist From Starbucks
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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
Read more →What Google Should Have Done With Blogger FTP Accounts
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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...
Read more →Who Do I Write This Blog For?
4 comments
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 the blog. Only after the...
Read more →The Seattle Times Likes Me
Yesterday I was interviewed by the Seattle Times Coffee City Blog. 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...
Read more →The Email Rant
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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...
Read more →My Issues With Meetup.com
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This post is for members, organizers, and employees of Meetup.com. If that doesn't describe you, you can stop reading now. Meetup.com is a way to get away from the computer and meet people in your...
Read more →MichaelAllenSmith - The Sharpie Redesign
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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,...
Read more →Leaving Las Vegas - Google Returns Queen Anne to Seattle
1 comment
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...
Read more →Google Thinks Queen Anne is in Las Vegas
I solved a mystery this week that has been puzzling me for a while. Before heading outside, I would jump onto Google and type "weather 98109". 98109 is the zip code for the Queen Anne neighborhood of...
Read more →Growing Up During the Pixel Depression
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Gather around children, I've got a story to tell about the olden days. Way back in the year 1995 AD, I got my first web hosting account and starting making web pages. I was 100% self taught and still...
Read more →Creating a Filtered RSS Feed Using Yahoo! Pipes
Do you read any blogs that just seem to have too many posts to read? Perhaps you are only interested in reading certain posts. With Yahoo! Pipes you can easily create a custom web page and RSS feed...
Read more →Tampa Bay Satire 1997-1998
Before CriticalMAS existed I had a personal website hosted with a local ISP in the Tampa Bay area. The site had a very popular local radio guide called What's the Frequency Tampa?. It listed radio...
Read more →I Hate BlogSpot Too
It amazes me why a talented blogger would use the BlogSpot service provided by Google's Blogger. A blog is the intellectual property of the writer and yet brilliant writers and photographers will use...
Read more →Death to Blogger
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. They have no...
Read more →Return HTML Page Source From Web URL in C#
2 comments
Below is a snippet of code showing how to retrieve the page source of a web page. This code will return the HTML source from the home page on this site. It will then load that HTML into the...
Read more →Single Line If Statement in C#
2 comments
Here is a standard if ... then statement in Cfollowed by a single line example. Using a single line if statement will reduce the number of lines of code. if (dayOfTheWeek == "Tuesday") { ...
Read more →Selling RanchoSanPasqual.org
Almost a month ago I announced that I would be selling RanchoSanPasqual.org. I created the RSP site to help sell my house. My house sold. Now it's time to reduce my commitment to this site. I have...
Read more →Mixing Photos With Classical Artwork
2 comments
Today I was having some fun in Photoshop. Take the colors from a classical painting and apply them to a photograph. Below is an autumn photograph from New England, a Monet painting and the resulting...
Read more →The Greatest Blog Post Ever Written
If you have a blog and have ever been contacted by a reporter from the real media, head over to Calculated Risk, and read Media Inquiries Policy. It's so brilliant, I have it bookmarked and will just...
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