I've recently gotten a few e-mails about the lack of an RSS feed on KTracy.com and the status of my Podcast; which I said was coming not long after revamping the web design in 2021 and, as of September 2023, still has not materialized. So, in the interest of transparency, here's where we stand.

The KTracy.com Podcast

Honestly, I've been thinking a LOT about this for a while. Since going back to hand coding the website, things have been chaotic. I started dating Katie, lost a job, was self employed, got a new job, got engaged to Katie, sold my house, moved in with my parents until the wedding, got married, moved in with Katie, and we're now buying a new house. It's been a lot of change in just two and a half years. There just wasn't a good time to start a podcast.

However, I've known for a while what I wanted to do. I've been in talks with two former KTracy.com contributors, including Travis Gearhart who was the former host of the Matters of Opinion Podcast and my co-host for the short lived Brain Frack podcast. In addition to them, a great friend of mine from the Air Force should be joining us and I have a local guy I've wanted to bring in for a while, too.

Right now, I'm planning on a monthly podcast where we discuss the events of the past month on KTracy.com and anything the guys think I maybe should have discussed on KTracy.com but didn't, then discuss what's coming up in the month ahead.

If the show runs more than a couple hours, we'll probably switch to a weekly podcast.

Anyway, I hope to do a pilot episode at the end of November, to be released the first of December. In addition to hammering out the format, I'll want to be confident about the podcast platform and hosting service I'm going to use. I want to make sure I'm maximizing our revenue potential while keeping control of our content and protecting us from the Political Correctness police. My preference is to just host everything on KTracy.com, but I want it to be available on Google, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

RSS Feeds

Okay, nobody asked about RSS feeds for two years. Now, in the space of a couple weeks, I've had three people ask about it. I have no idea why there's suddenly interest, but I get why. For those that use RSS readers, it's pretty freaking awesome and lets you follow your favorite people without relying on social media.

Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to be adding RSS feeds anytime soon.

RSS feeds are much easier to implement with WordPress or a similar CMS. However, because I'm hand coding my website, the RSS feed creation is a more involved process. I haven't done a ton of research into this yet, but I think there's a way to do it similar to what I'm using to create my sitemap file. There's just one problem: The Archives.

I'm in the process of restoring the archives from 2010. I also know for certain that I have content from 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, the rest of 2010, and 2013 ready to be given their own pages. In addition to those, I think I have files from 2011, 2012, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 somewhere on a hard drive that I can't seem to find, probably because of all the moving.

Those archives will need to be complete prior to me creating an automated process for the RSS Feed. Otherwise, any time I bulk add a bunch of articles from the distant pass to this website, they'll bounce the more recent content you want to read off that RSS feed.

So in summary, the RSS feed won't begin until I'm relatively certain I've restored as much of the archive as possible.