1. Notes: 17 / 2 years ago  from ckck

    In Memoriam: Geocities

    ckck:

    I’m glad to see the passing of Geocities being noted today, here on Tumblr and elsewhere. Even if it’s been more or less irrelevant in this decade, for those who’ve been around the internet block for a while, Geocities played a big role in the early days and it’s hard not to feel a bit sentimental and nostalgic hearing that it has finally been shuttered.

    I had my very first website on Geocities, I had my own spot in the Hollywood neighbourhood. The way Geocities categorized and assigned your website address back then seems utterly laughable these days, but then it seemed perfectly normal to pick a neighbourhood and then pick a number, as if you were moving to a house. But a lot of the early web was like that in my mind, emulating pre-existing things as to make them seem more familiar and relatable.

    I wish I still had a record of my first website somewhere, but I think it has gone by way of the dinosaurs, but you can take my word for it, it definitely looked a lot like today’s xkcd’s tribute, which is eerily familiar.

    Yes GeoCities was the bomb. It’s sad to see it go, bringing with it a big part of first-hand internet history (the millions of abandoned sites lying around). In fact I found a very useful 90s GeoCities site last week, and just now finished downloading the entire site to preserve it. My first internet prescense happened to be on Tripod (which if you remember was one of the big three free web hosts along with sister-site Angelfire and GeoCities). Tripod and Angelfire, both owned by Lycos, still exist today although I doubt anyone really uses it being that it’s completely stuck in the early 2000s and still offers a measly 20MB. I made my first site using the horrible WYSIWYG editor built into Publisher 2000. It was all I had back in the dial-up/elementary school days, but it turned out ok. I can’t seem to remember the URL anymore, but good memories anyway.

  2. Notes

    1. downlookingup reblogged this from ckck and added:
      Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine,...might get something.
    2. andrewnonumbers reblogged this from ckck and added:
      Yes GeoCities was the bomb. It’s sad...it go, bringing with it a big part
    3. ckck posted this
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