About KTracy.com

KTracy.com is undoubtedly the best website on the Internet thanks to the wisdom and guidance of its namesake, Kevin Tracy. This page is dedicated to the history and purpose of KTracy.com over the years. Kevin Tracy purchased the KTracy.com domain name in March of 2004. However, the history of KTracy.com actually begins several years before that in 2001.

The Before Times

At a young age, Kevin Tracy's father introduced the young future cultural phenomenon to computing. When the "World Wide Web" began taking shape in the mid-1990s, Kevin Tracy's father purchased an enormous 1,200 page text book about learning HTML. While Kevin's father ultimately didn't have time for it, Kevin Tracy picked it up out of curiousity. A short time later, the young lad had famously taught himself how to write HTML when he was in 6th grade. Using Geocities, Kevin Tracy used his newfound knowledge of HTML to create Star Wars fan sites on Geocities for his Star Wars mailing list; which was essentially an early-Internet version of a forum.

By the time Kevin Tracy had entered high school, he was wildly proficient in late 90s web design. Using only Notepad and his knowledge of HTML, Kevin Tracy would write websites faster than classmates using HTML editors such as Netscape Composer. While cringe worthy by modern Internet design standards, Kevin Tracy's web site designs pushed the limits of web design in the late 1990s. Finally, in the year 2000, Kevin Tracy created the true precursor to KTracy.com.

Before the start of his sophmore year in high school, Kevin Tracy's high school started a Random Drug Test policy. While Kevin Tracy was not and never would become a drug user, he was irritated that students could be randomly pulled from class and forced to provide a urine sample without any reason for suspicion. He decided to run for Class President at the end of his Sophmore year; which resulted in a hilarious campaign that resulted in regular detentions, calls to his parents, slander from school administrators, and culminated in a week-long suspension and rigged election. It was absolutely glorious. Kevin Tracy documented his demands and positions on his Angelfire website at chs1.webdare.com. Kevin Tracy's campaign was controversial, but the school did change its random drug test policy.

In 2001, Kevin decided to run for class representative. This time, the web design was inspired by the White House website used by the new George W. Bush administration featuring a blue header and sidebar with navigation. This time his campaign was successful and the web design stuck around as Kevin Tracy used his website to update his friends and classmates on the events he thought they should be made aware of as well as his take on political and cultural current events. (See the 2001 Archives). It was during this time that his appointed his friends to various different staff positions and the website began to look like the current rendition of KTracy.com.

When Kevin Tracy graduated in 2002 and enlisted in the Air Force, the site slowly faded into obscurity. However, in 2003, a random web surfer stumbled across the website and fell in love with Kevin Tracy's unique style of writing and wanted to know if he was creating web content anywhere else. She inspired Kevin Tracy to re-login to the site and begin updating it once more with an exclusive focus on politics. The site was already filled with content that was easy to build on and the site began to become increasingly popular.

By the end of 2003, a fan of Kevin Tracy's invited him to host his site on his FTP to get rid of the Angelfire ads. In March 2004, he helped Kevin Tracy purchase the KTracy.com domain name (Kevin Tracy was called "KTracy" by his peers in the Air Force).

The Golden Era of KTracy.com

This era of KTracy.com was especially challenging. Kevin Tracy's job as an Operations Intelligence Analyst in the U.S. Air Force was not something he could share. However, the site exploded in popularity in military circles. Fans would call friends back home and the site spread like wildfire to the point where most people no longer realized Kevin Tracy was in the military. However, it was a constant struggle to keep the site below the radar of his commanders, who might have shut it down at any time. He later found out that several officers and one of his squadron commanders knew about the site and enjoyed reading it, too.

Always seeking to improve the experience of KTracy.com, and inspired by websites like Homestar Runner and Secret of Mana Theater, Kevin Tracy sought to add multimedia content and merch to his site.

The merch was handled by CafePress; which was expensive but no big deal. The sudden influx of multimedia content began crashing the server KTracy.com was hosted on. By mid-2004, Kevin Tracy moved KTracy.com to Bluehost.com (where it remains hosted to this day).

Kevin Tracy would create a random video every month. And by random, we mean RANDOM. Kevin Tracy did peanut butter taste tests, art videos, lip singing, and political commentary. All of his videos ended with "Thank you, Grandma" - a tradition that continues in Kevin Tracy's comics today.

Speaking of multimedia content and comics, Kevin actually launched three webcomics in this time. The first two, about a couple of half-witted reserve police officers and another about a female-version of Dick Tracy based on his sister failed for various reasons. The third would turn into The MSPaint Comic

As the site grew in popularity, Kevin Tracy began to grow dissatisfied with static web design. By 2005, Kevin Tracy was receiving hundreds of e-mails a day from fans and critics; many of which should have been comments. Yet, static web design is notoriously difficult to add comments to. This required a major overhaul.

bbForum Era

Although WordPress and other CMS options were available in late 2005, they were extremely limited in the scope. Instead, Kevin Tracy forced himself to learn the basics of PHP and rebuild KTracy.com from scratch using and extremely self-modified installation of phpBB2.

This rendition of KTracy.com was fantastic and equally popular. Web traffic continued to grow and the new commenting system was saving a lot of space in Kevin Tracy's inbox. Unfortunately, the heavily modified version of phpBB2 required an enormous investment of time in order to keep it online and functional. Every minor security patch resulted in major rework on the back end. By 2007, deeply involved with his new job as a counterterrorism analyst and more focused on his art, Kevin Tracy decided it wasn't worth the struggle. He shut down the site for a month while he began searching for a new CMS and a more out-of-the-box solution.

The First WordPress Era

Kevin Tracy ultimately settled on WordPress. At the time in 2007, it was extremely light weight, easy to modify themes, featured tons of high-quality free extensions, and focused almost exclusively on the writing experience; which was perfect for Kevin Tracy and his limited time.

Due to the nature of WordPress, the staff took a major backseat as KTracy.com changed from a unique web experience to a ordinary blog with an extraordinary writer. Kevin Tracy did keep one staff member around, however. Semp, his chief of staff, stayed around to write very in depth and complex position papers that would be published on the site. Together, they decided to endorse Mike Huckabee in the 2008 Republican Primary. While existing fans of KTracy.com were disappointed by the change in direction, Kevin Tracy and Semp became the most influential bloggers supporting Mike Huckabee. This resulted in increased access to the campaign as Kevin Tracy traveled across the country to cover the grassroots campaign.

In 2008, Kevin redesigned the WordPress theme from scratch to have a more professional look and lead the site into the next decade. As Kevin Tracy broke off from the Huckabee team, he found himself attracting a new fan base through his active involvement in the Tea Party movement as he traveled from state to state rallying crowds with energetic speeches that fired people up like few others could.

However, by 2013, WordPress was beginning to change. Instead of being lightweight, easy to modified, and featuring tons of high quality free extensions; WordPress was becoming sluggish and heavy, nearly impossible to modify, and full-featured plugins were being hidden almost entirely behind paywalls. In several ways, WordPress was now worse than phpBB2.

A Short Lived Static Web Design

By early 2014, HTML5 had been out for a while and Kevin Tracy was anxious to see what it could do. He made the radical decision to scrap WordPress entirely and rebuild the site using only HTML5, CSS, and his own PHP basic scripts. The experiment was actually a real success, but very quickly ran into a major problem later that year when The MSPaint Comic: Volume 1 was released.

The Second WordPress Era

Kevin Tracy felt very strongly that he needed to be able to sell The MSPaint Comic: Volume 1 from KTracy.com. As he experimented with different e-commerce solutions, he realized that WooCommerce was the best option for KTracy.com. WooCommerce, unfortunately, requires WordPress.

As quickly as the static site went up, it was brought down again and WordPress was re-installed.

Kevin Tracy felt defeated having to return to WordPress so quickly, but the idea of returning KTracy.com to its former static site glory did not fade. In fact, as WordPress became increasingly bulky, slow, and server heavy, Kevin Tracy desire to ditch the CMS only grew more intense. However, he was trapped by WooCommerce.

He never expected this second WordPress era would last until 2021, but it did.

The Modern KTracy.com

The final straw was a Google search. Due to a legal dispute, Kevin Tracy thought it would be wise to Google himself, but all that was coming up was his website. He logged out of his Google account, turned on his VPN, and tried again. This time, Kevin Tracy found that KTracy.com wasn't even appearing on the first page of the search results. Even worse, his LinkedIn and Twitter profile pages appeared before his website. This was completely unacceptable. He immediately called his staff for their first meeting in 14 years.

After investigation, it was determined that KTracy.com was loading way too slowly and it was damaging the search engine optimization. Additionally, because KTracy.com was essentially a blog, it was no longer a site about Kevin Tracy. At it's core, the KTracy.com that really exploded in popularity and upon which our digial empire was built was a hyped up personal website. Additionally, it was the belief of the staff that conservative political blogs are becoming increasingly oppressed by Google.

Returning KTracy.com to a static site was an enormous challenge that required some sacrifices. The reason KTracy.com moved to a database driven CMS in 2005 was because Kevin Tracy wanted comments. However, in the preceding 15 years, comments sections have largely become havens for trolls. It's the belief now of Kevin Tracy and the staff that not allowing comments will actually help KTracy.com in three ways. First, we're eliminating troll infestations. Second, we're encouraging people to respond by leaving a message on the Contact page. It is our belief that messages sent this way encourage more thought and contemplation, resulting in more fruitful discussions and preventing many short, stupid comments. Third, and most importantly, if someone wants to respond publicly, they'll have to link to our page on either their own page or social media account and share it with their followers and readers that way.

Another challenge was the store. Kevin Tracy is convinced that there's a better solution to WordPress and WooCommerce out there. However, until the staff finds or develops that solution from scratch, everyone at KTracy.com has agreed it is prudent just to run the store on its own site (https://store.ktracy.com). In addition to speeding up the rest of the site and improving SEO in the process, by separating the store from the rest of the site, we believe we are less likely to have the store punished for our decision to discuss and take positions on controversial topics or any raunchy art that gets shared in The Kevin Tracy Museum of Art and Photography. Google actually banned KTracy.com from buying Internet ads in 2020 without explanation, but we think it was due to discussing the China Virus.

One obstacle that Kevin Tracy and his staff failed to consider was content creation. When KTracy.com was created, we had forgotten that there was already three years worth of content ready to be linked to.

When we launched the modern KTracy.com, we failed to realize how much content needed static webpages and literally none of them existed.

The goal of Kevin Tracy and the staff now is to have the site totally populated with the latest up-to-date multimedia and polished with tons of easter eggs by the end of 2021.

The Goal of KTracy.com Today

Recent events have taught us the dangers and problems with social media. Kevin Tracy has long decried the monetization of social media: a system where large corporations make large sums of money selling our private information when the only attraction to their site is the content generated by their users; which they lay claim to. Although these social media networks need to collect profits to continue offering their services, users who create content and surrender their personal data that is sold to third parties deserve a cut of those profits, as well. The better alternative is that everyone has their own website.

Our goal with KTracy.com is to encourage others to develop awesome websites of their own and to interact with one another via personal websites (using e-mail and IndieWeb) so that they own their own data and have exclusive rights to monetize (or not monetize) that data.

Our secondary goal is the make sure the world knows how freaking awesome Kevin Tracy is!