2002 & 2010 Restorations Complete

Merry Christmas! I promised to have the 2010 Archives restored before the end of the year, but I have a surprise for you all! The 2002 Archives have been fully restored, as well!!!

Truthfully, the 2002 archives only had one or two articles in them. Most of them were what today would be short Tweets that were placed on the home page, so the restoration was pretty simple. However, it's still important to pull lessons learned from this restoration. We actually did this with the 2001 Archives once they were restored. The goal with this exercise is to document inspirations gleamed from reviewing all of my old content to find things that I did right that I may have forgotten about, or wrong and I didn't realize at the time.

Admiration For The Past Kevin

Back in 2002, social media platforms like Twitter didn't exist. What's remarkable to me is that I heavily utilized the Tweet format years before it was common. For a long time, I thought content and pages were king, but they were a pain in the butt because of how long they take to create. However, when relaying short messages, a few simple words is often enough. This mindset of needing full, independent articles was likely a byproduct of over a decade enslaved to WordPress (and phpBB2 in 2006). Content management systems really like to categorize content that way. However, when I started hand coding this website, I wanted to make it a point to break those tendencies.

Having Contributors Really Helped

In 2002, a great amount of my content was created by my friends Greg, Carl, and Rob. In 2010, my buddy Travis Gearhart generated nearly (if not more than) half of the content for that year. It wasn't unusual that my website was updated twice a day thanks to their help.

Unfortunately, this is one of the downsides of creating content without a dedicated CMS. Although I'm comfortable creating content with HTML and CSS, I don't know anyone else who is that I would trust to write on KTracy.com.

Eventually, I hope to have a way to use microformats to make it easier for Katie (my beautiful wife) to post pictures and short messages on this site. Those permissions might be given to Travis, Semp, and a few others once the podcast kicks off. In the meantime though, KTracy.com is sadly going to remain a solo operatoin for a bit longer.

Where I Failed: Perennial Content

The 2010 Archives took a long time to completely restore. Everytime I added a bunch of new pages, I updated the sitemap and posted it to Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console. I can't speak for Bing, but Google Search Console indicated that not a single page of my archives were indexed. That's wildly frustrating, but not surprising since it's unlikely anybody will be searching for the time then-Vice-President Joe Biden insulted Richard Blumenthal or my prediction that Rick Santorum would run for President in 2012. Ironically, behind the scenes, I was annoyed with Travis for creating less relevant content relative to current events, but a decade and a half later, his content has remained orders of magnitude more relevant than the stuff I wrote; including his article about the then-emerging practice of sexting and his Where Have All The Cowboys Gone? article about the decline of manliness in western society.

The lack of Perennial Content is something that I think is holding me back today, too. It wasn't until I saw it in the 2010 archives that I realized the problem. Granted, those old posts still generate 50-80 hits a month; which add up as more content is added to the site. However, it would be much more awesome to generate three times that traffic or more with content that remains relevant for years to come. That's difficult to do when writing about politics, but it kind of emphasizes the need for an "Issues" section that I have been toying with bringing back since early in the WordPress era.

I used to care more

Reading the old archives, it's pretty clear to see how passionate I was about politics. In 2002, I was full of incredible excitement and energy despite my inexperience. By 2010, I had a ton of experience and that exuberance hadn't really faded.

It would be dishonest to say I don't care anymore, but the passion for politics is largely gone. I care now only because I have to and it's my job as a veteran and citizen to pay attention, but I don't love it like I did.

Honestly, my faith has been taking priority in my life for several years now and it's something I'm getting more passionate about with every passing year. The only problem is that it's a topic I am by no means a master of. Even after a decade of on-again, off-again study, it's a topic where I'm keenly aware of how unintelligent I am.

It could be fun to write about that in more detail, and I know it's a great way to learn fast, but I'm not sure this is the place to share those musings where I could make myself guilty of heresy waaaay too easily.

Love For The Site and the Visitors

One thing has stayed consistent, however. That is my love for this site and my visitors. This site really has its history going back to my 2001 campaign for class representative in my junior year.

I never intended to continue this site after my senior year of high school. I actively searched for another class representative to take over the http://chs1.webdare.com web address for the 2002-2003 school year when I was in the Air Force.

Seeing the old archives, I remembered how much it bothered me that nobody else knew HTML that could take it over. I gave up and moved on to much bigger things in the Air Force later in 2002. It wasn't until after I was in technical school before someone found my old website and told me how great it was and wanted to know what I was working on now. It helped that she was a girl and very cute.

At first, I hosted the site on Angelfire with the old chs1.webdare.com web address. In 2004, I bought KTracy.com, and the next 20 years were history.