2022-11-04
2001 Archives Inspire Change to 2022 Web Design
The KTracy.com Staff was hard at work the past few weeks organizing the archives from the predecessor of KTracy.com in 2001 and converting the surrounding HTML to use the dynamic php includes we use today. One of the options we considered was just bringing the 2001 website back online and hiding it somewhere in the site as an easter egg. We ultimately decided not to do that for a variety of reasons, but while investigating the option; Kevin Tracy, Carl Sven, and many members of the Ministry of Information Technology found themselves inspired by how the site handled its archives.
Inspiration 1: Not Everything Needs A Press Release
To be clear, Kevin Tracy is happy with how we post content today. However, back in 2001, the site functioned as both a place to place links to original content and what was essentially an early version of Twitter. If you take a look at the 2001 web archives, you'll see what we mean. Most of the lines are individual short messages to visitors for quick updates, like short format Tweets. Only a few of these messages have links to press conferences or speech transcripts. Since re-launching KTracy.com as a hand coded site again in 2022, Kevin Tracy has been overwhelmed by the massive amount of work necessary to keep the site fresh compared to what he remembered from the early years. This is why. Kevin Tracy simply produces more content today.
Inspiration 2: Archives as Sitemaps
This answered a long standing question Kevin Tracy has had about his old HTML website. Kevin remembered posting a list of links on the main page, but he didn't remember having an enormous list containing years of material.
Relaunching the website 21 years later on our private network, we re-discovered how this was handled. Every couple of weeks to a month, Kevin would start a new "In Focus:" section; which is essentially how months are used today. It defined the big stuff going on during that period, either nationally or personally. After Kevin started the next period, the previous "In Focus" section would be moved to a "News" page.
We REALLY like this and want to bring it to the modern KTracy.com with a modern twist.
In 2001, the news.html page was really just an archive that functioned as a sitemap without a handful of links on the homepage.
We feel like this may be a bit misleading to call it news without the NEW content in the NEWs page. So, what we're discussing is keeping all of the latest updates for the month in a php include. When the month is over, we'll copy that month's content to the news page and begin filling in the php include again. Then, because we have the current month's news in a php include, we can include that php include's content on the news page.
The news page then functions as a true sitemap with links to every page on the site.
Since we're blaming the drop in web traffic on the manual sitemap, creating new content like this ensures the sitemap is always updated and frees up space on the home page for more content, such as links to the KTracy.com Store, new galleries, or any special short term projects Kevin Tracy wants to share with you. This can create a much nicer, more engaging experience for first time visitors to KTracy.com.
Inspiration 3: Personal Narrative
What really made the 2001 archives special was how personal the updates were to Kevin Tracy. We did remove some of the content, as discussed before because it would possibly be too personal for some people mentioned, but most of it was restored and archived. The vast majority of the content was about Kevin's daily life, not political analysis. Kevin himself was the product back then, not his analysis.
We're really curious to see how much this changed from 2001 through 2005 when the site switch to phpBB2 and later to WordPress in 2007. We know in 2007, the primary emphasis was on analysis; which generated a ton of traffic, but we are pretty sure most of that traffic was because of Kevin's connection to the 2007/2008 Presidential Campaign of Mike Huckabee and Kevin's endorsement of Huckabee early in the primary.
We're thinking that personal touch may be called for moving forward in 2023.
Inspiration 4: Feuds
In high school, Kevin Tracy had friends in virtually every social clique and was able to maintain fun feuds with some other students with use of his website. At the time, it was unusual for people to have personal websites and social media didn't exist. However, looking back at how much fun he had in 2001, Kevin is thinking it may be worth while to start criticizing some other personal websites out there to start some rivalries and promote competition between personal website creators.
KTracy.com legal counsel Francesca Jones has strongly advised against this; which pretty much guarantees that Kevin will be causing trouble sometime in the near future.
Inspiration 5: Zero F**ks to Give
Almost the entire KTracy.com staff was delighted by a lot of the content and has pushed Kevin to stop caring about the consequences and do whatever he wants. Francesca insisted that I report that she was mortified by this prospect, but she's no fun.
