2022-11-03
Reflections on the 2001 Archives
The Ministry of Propaganda has been hard at work the past two months restoring what's left of the archives from my 2001 website; which I used from 2001 to 2002 as a member of Student Government in my senior year of high school. I didn't own KTracy.com back then, I had to use a free subdomain tool to make my Angelfire site appear as chs1.webdare.com (which still directs to KTracy.com). Late last night, we finished restoring the 2001 archives and they're now available for your viewing.
I was 17 years old, so it's definitely cringeworthy. However, these 2001 archives are also hugely important to the history of KTracy.com. Not a lot of people know this, but in 2003; while I was in the Air Force, I had all but forgotten this website. Then, a very beautiful and flirtatious woman e-mailed me after she found the abandoned site having loved the content and wanted to know if I had plans to make more. The resulting site; which pulled heavily from this 2001/2002 site design; was strongly inspired by these old archives. That's actually why I instructed the staff to restore the 2001/2002 content first.
With that history revealed, what really surprised me was just how little written content I actually created. I chastise myself frequently for not posting on this site more, but I hardly ever wrote any new content for my website back in 2001. I'm curious to see if 2002 was more active, or if I just remember being more active on this site than I actually was. Despite the lack of written content, there was more that didn't appear in the archives that I largely forgot about. There were a ton of desktop wallpapers in full upscaled 800x600 resolution, photo galleries, and even a *.wmv video file; which was really early for such content since most people were still on 56k modems.
Missing was just about everything good SEO strategies require today. There were no external links, no linking between pages, HTML nav bars changed from one page to the next as they were updated and old pages were left as-is (I didn't fix it until 2005 with php includes). However, what I really enjoyed about the site is that I just did whatever the heck I wanted.
I could be wrong, but I don't think you had access to web traffic statistics using the free Angelfire sites from this era. I literally didn't care about web traffic because I couldn't see what my web traffic looked like.
What Carl mentioned earlier about these old static pages from the Web 1.0 days being cancel proof is totally true. This content was created 21 years ago and it was relatively simple to restore. Even if the HTML isn't totally valid anymore, it still renders the page just fine. We could have migrated the old site onto KTracy.com with ease just by copying the files onto the FTP, and we might still do that one day, but for now, we wanted the content in the modern KTracy.com format for SEO purposes.
Unfortunately, I did decide to censor the content a bit. I had friends in high school that I teased a bit here, and although it was 2001, I'm not comfortable posting the teases again years (decades) after last speaking to some of them. If we were still friends, I wouldn't have had a problem posting any of it. Other content I know some of those involved are a lot more sensitive about today and have successfully turned a new leaf in life. Posting jokes about their old behavior with their name just seemed like it might have been unnecessarily cruel to who they are today, even if they got a kick out of it back then.
Finally, I did skim over all of the content that has been restored for the first time since 2003 and didn't find anything too offensive, but I only lightly skimmed it. It is very possible, perhaps even probable, that there is something I wrote that would be considered politically incorrect today. If you find something like this in there, please keep in mind that I was an idiot 17 year old kid who often went out of his way to offend people for nothing more than his own amusement.
I sincerely hope you enjoy the archives.
