I've officially decided to mothball some features here on KTracy.com. Some of them have been removed recently, others have been waiting for a re-introduction, but I've decided there's not really a path forward to bring it back anytime in the near future. Below is the list and my reasoning for mothballing them.

• Yesterday's Fitbit Stats
• Recent Photo
• Recent Photo Album
• Phone Status
• Live Video
• Bluehost Ads

Reason 1: The Raspberry Pi Mystery

At the KTracy Manor, I had two Raspberry Pi 3Bs and another Raspberry Pi 4. They sat in storage for the better part of a year, but now that I'm ready to use them, they're all missing. Even the box labeled "Raspberry Pis" had all of the hard drives and peripherals attached to my Raspberry Pis, but no Raspberry Pis. I would be tempted to think that someone broke in and stole them, but they were buried deep in my storage unit and to get to them, thieves would have had to move boxes labeled with far more valuable items. Even if they were just after personal data, they passed boxes of tax records, military records, and the actual hard drives I had connected to the Raspberry Pis; hard drives that were actually more expensive than the Raspberry Pis. Anyway, I have no idea where these are and that's foiled my attempts to replace the extremely unreliable Multcloud file synchronization service KTracy.com used for the Fitbit and Recent Image features.

Reason 2: Phone Status Not Necessary

The Phone Status was meant to display how charged my phone battery was and whether or not it was charging. While Multcloud ultimately made this an impossible feature to use, I decided this project could be totally scrapped in the light of a different and more effective automation. After I got married to Katie, I created an IFTTT routine that would text my wife if my Android phone ever dropped below 20% or if I took the phone off the charger when it was less than 20%. Realistically, Katie was the only person that was going to tell me to charge my phone based on the information on the website. This saves her the step of looking at my website and alerts her only if my phone needs to be on the charger.

Reason 3: Live footage requires too much code before streaming

Before I stream on Twitch, I have a whole routine that involves getting water, testing my voice, making sure I've eaten, peeing, trying to poop, preparing my workspace, and alerting my Discord community. The last thing I want to add to this routine is log into my FTP, modify the code on my index.php file for the homepage, and make sure the stream is working on this website.

Reason 4: Failing Confidence in Bluehost

My growing distain for Bluehost is a topic for another blog post, but to summarize: I've been with Bluehost for 18 years. When I started with Bluehost, the support staff were phenomenal. I don't know if it's true, but it seemed like the people you were chatting with were Americans working in the same building as the servers their customers' content is served from. Today, you know you're talking to someone from India who has shockingly little technical knowledge. The last two interactions I had with support needed to be escalated to a manager because the original agent I was connected with was unbelievably incompetent.

I've also felt like they've been trying too hard to upsell me on services I don't need by using scary and urgent ads for these services as full page popups that get in the way of me actually getting to the cPanel. Even more annoying, they've tailored the back end for people using WordPress, hiding that all important cPanel in a custom backend for managing your WordPress installations with no way to log in directly to the cPanel.

I also never felt like Bluehost provided any additional bang for the buck as my annual payments have gone up, but it seems like I'm still held to the same bandwidth and speed limitations I had in 2007. I think the time is coming soon to leave Bluehost, and I don't want to recommend a service I myself am not thrilled with.

The Future

I don't plan to give up on these features all together. The recent image feature, in particular, is exceptionally important to me. Some of these will come back in a new way that doesn't realy on a third party service like Multcloud. If you have any ideas for how best to automate this content, please let me know.