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Yahoo Pulls the Plug On GeoCities
Mike writes "It's official: Yahoo is pulling the plug, and GeoCities is dead. GeoCities had suffered a long and drawn-out battle with its health over the past decade. An antiquated service model and outdated technology are widely blamed for the struggle. An official cause of death, however, has yet to be determined. Awful, eye-punishing graphics, lack of relevancy, and 'lowest-common-denominator design' are believed to have contributed to its demise. GeoCities was 15 years old." There is doubtless a lot of funny and informative stuff on there that's worth saving (not just Jesux, which pudge has now migrated). If some of it belongs to you, perhaps you should move it sometime in the next few months. Update: 04/24 18:10 GMT by T : And if you know some GeoCities page owners who aren't especially computer savvy, you could point out to them how easy it is to slurp down their pages for re-hosting elsewhere.
RIP Geocities, the Friendster of the 90's generation.
Nothing lost but sad. I remember those days of geocities prospering. But I was more tripod.com guy than geocities. Hope tripod.com will live for longer. I am actually using it still for something.
o_O
My favorite part about Geocities, in 1996, was the themed Neighborhoods. The internet seemed so much smaller back then, like the number of pages could have fit into the multiple neighborhoods of Geocities. RIP Times Square
I don't remember much about Geocities, but I do remember that I absolutely HATED having their advertisements on my page.
It's funny, though, if you look at MySpace or Facebook now they're absolutely cluttered with flashy, obtrusive advertisements and I don't give it much thought. Guess it goes to show, you can get used to anything.
For all the griping people do.. it wasn't that bad
And it's visual design tool really was amazing.
Users didn't need to worry about arranging stuff into tables.. you could just drag your graphic where ever you wanted .. or put text anywhere.. etc.
Sure, it let a lot of garbage leak onto the Internet.. but it also let people with something interesting to contribute an easy way of doing so.
And lets face it.. was the output of a geocities website designed with the visual designer that much different than most of the myspace pages you see? (that isn't an endorsement for myspace..). If you have interesting content.. the design matters a lot less (and again.. not saying that myspace contains interesting content).
As somebody who learned HTML and Javascript with GeoCities, that's really too bad. Yes, GeoCities is the home of the stereotypical mid 90's "home page" with animated gifs and background MIDI music but I still occasionally come across very worthwhile information on GeoCities via Google and in terms of reliable free hosting with pretty unobtrusive ads it was pretty good. It seems somewhat rash to just shut it down outright.
I wonder if there isn't some way they could just take a snapshot of the domain as it is right now, and then keep that online. Give site owners the ability to delete their site, but no longer allow editing or uploading. That would be pretty low maintenance and certainly they still receive ad revenue from it, but maybe not enough to cover costs.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Prodigy tried the flashy nasty ad thing before AOL and was pulverized for it. AOL made a whole business plan around it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"Awful, eye-punishing graphics, lack of relevancy, and 'lowest-common-denominator design' are believed to have contributed to it's demise."
Sounds like myspace
GeoCities:
Learn HTML, post Animated Gifs, Blare Midis
MySpace:
post Animated Gifs, Blare Mp3s
YouTube:
Blare "Animated" Videos with Sound
Twitter:
Blare
i hosted my first website, a WW II history site, on geocities - before the ad requirements got out of hand. when their ads got completely obnoxious, i asked for a way to keep the ad in a top frame, or any way to keep it from covering my content, but was told to pony up cash.
random ads over WW II pictures, especially some of the pictures of fallen soldiers I had up, didn't sit well with me - so I ponied up cash for a real webhost, and didn't look back.
perhaps i'm just too good at holding a grudge, but i'm glad they're dead.
the united states is a nation of laws; badly written and randomly enforced -- frank zappa
Wow, MS must like it when ever someone running a lot of *nix(FreeBSD) servers switches to Windows or in this case, drops out. Now they can report being more successful because they own a larger percentage of websites.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Imagine Google, Facebook and Twitter 10 years from now.
The Wayback machine has a pretty good snapshots of GeoShitties
I don't know, when researching some really really old file formats for some old games, I found that a lot of documentation for them was held on sites like geocities, long since forgotten about and destined to be lost if Yahoo just pulls the plug completely. No doubt there's a fair amount of information littered over the service amidst all of the Frontpage 97 templated gif-fests.
At the very least, they should let archive.org or something back the whole damn thing up, it may have been a rubbish service, but it's still an important part of internet history.
That and they'd actually be able to supply some decent bandwidth to the things.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Cartoon Girls That I Wanna Nail - http://www.geocities.com/televisioncity/1356/
Now say that again knowing what will be lost!
You can't take the sky from me.
I hate the guts out of myspace and facebook. Seriously. There is no content. For example, I search for a new 'hip' band, so they only have a myspace page. Now, try to find the band biography or past tourdates. You won't find it. Instead, you will see a list of pictures of 'friends' of the band, about whom you couldn't care less. In that respect, Geocities actuallý was better, because at least you had a chance (even if it was small) of finding useful information there.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Where will we go for our fix of lousy, horribly formatted websites from 1997?
I feel bad for this sucker:
WHAT A SHAMBLES & A POOR SHOW. NO ONE WANTS TO KNOW EITHER. FORTUNATELY I SAVED MY WEBPAGE & TRANSFERRED IT TO GEOCITIES.
Link Here: http ://geocities.yahoo.com/v/gcp_choose/
Real easy to do a simple webpage. With more time I think this could be better than aol.
Is this a news report or a trailer for a motion picture?
Enough Said
load "$",8,1
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
It'll probably be more like Google, Google and Google 10 years from now.
This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
I'd say there's a good chance Google will still be around in 10 years. I'd say there's very little chance Facebook is. And I'd say there's not a snowball's chance in Hell that Twitter is around in 5 years, never mind 10.
In the future all restaurants will be Google.
You can't take the sky from me.
I'd like to thank 'em giving even the tiniest bit of free webspace when nobody else did.
The reason we cann all remember Geocities was because there was neat stuff on it!!! Geocities was home to all the quirky people who had all sorts of goodies to post on the web, and no other means to do so.
Now they live on on google cache. It never forgets and never forgives.
I had my first website on XOOM, anybody remember them? Yes the company that tried to make a living by selling clip art and animated gifs. Unfortunately they always had a robots.txt file that denied web crawlers access to members.xoom.com which means everybody, including me, who had a website on XOOM wasn't archived by the wayback machine. :(
They were eventually partnered or bought by NBC to have iNBC.com of which died within soon after without warning and everything was lost. Well if you can even call it a loss. Yet another example as to why webmasters must ensure to keep a backup of their web sites on their local machine and/or by other means.
This space is not for rent.
WOW... Jesusx.
First time I've ever heard of it. Interesting, and definitely unique... I never would've thought of such a thing as a "Christian" based OS. I wonder if they ever got it off the ground.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
I remember Geocities, I hosted my first site there for 6 years. They can make fun all they want, Geocities was great.
I was working at yahoo in the early days and I got the job of working to integrate the stuff geocities was doing with some of our stuff. The moment I met them I was convinced these were the wrong sort of people to be working for yahoo. They developed on Windows by Crom! When anyone asks when yahoo started going downhill I point to the GeoCities acquisition.
I don't really see facebook disappearing any time soon, there is an awful lot of value there for the people who use it. It's the equivalent of a "box of polariods" for about half of all college students in the US.
If like me you want to make a backup of your site but only had the free account sans FTP httrack may be useful.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
<blink>This Comment Is Still Under Construction</blink>
(yes, even after 15 years)
And this is a spinning GIF logo. Your browser is just too tasteful to display it.
Da Blog
Ain't it the truth. Geocities attracted some of the most eye-gougingly terrible amateur designs, but shit, a lot of those people went on to lose the colorblindness, but kept the technical know-how they gained with their first little hobby site. I certainly did.
And nothing of value was lost.
Something of great value was lost!
Unfortunately it was lost long ago.
I remember the original Geocities... well before Yahoo bought them out. It was a thriving community of Internet users, the kind of people that had Internet access but didn't have web space, or their own server to host pages.
If you can't remember a Geocities before Yahoo! then please think twice before dismissing it.
If it wasn't for Geocities, I probably wouldn't be a Web Developer now. I used to code up pages on my ageing 8086 (without a graphical web browser, so I had no way of testing), I used to take the HTML files into college which had computers powerful enough to run Netscape. After a bit of debugging, I'd upload them to Geocities and they were live!
Sure, some people had nice web servers that their companies paid for, but I couldn't afford that, I just had my college's 1KB/sec Internet connection and my free Geocities account. It served me well!
I'll miss Geocities.
I'll also miss every other service that Yahoo! butchered too! Anyone remember the original Rocketmail, OneList? WebRing? Launch.com? All Seeing Eye?
All great services ruined by Yahoo!
I still use Flickr, but I worry for its future. Yahoo! have a bad history!
Last but not least...
RIP Geocities. You served me well! It's a pity Yahoo! murdered you!
its atrocious to go there now, but geocities was THE Thing back in the '90s. Learned a lot with it, learned a lot from it. So long, and thank you...
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
Not to mention the fact that back then the web was NEW to so many people! Shiny, fascinating and NEW! I had a page that listed my comic art collection. Many of the guy's fans contacted me thanking me for it. I became obsessed with tracking down and documenting EVERY, SINGLE, SOLITARY thing that he'd ever had published. The artist actually contacted me and asked if he could mirror it on his site when he got one a couple of years later. He actually said that he didn't remember half of the items on the list.
And there were lots of people like me on Geocities. Our pages didn't have to be good, they had to be the BEST. That fascination seems to have died off quite a bit in the past decade.
It saddens me to see the silver lining go down the drain with the rest of the cloud.
I have a few websites on Geocities because it is a free web hosting solution. Anyone have a suggestion as to where I should go?
God spoke to me.
As if millions of internet web pages suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened....
Every time I see the word "Geocities" I'm shocked that it's still around. I guess that's over now.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
"no other versions will be provided by default; we feel the KJV is the only English version that can be fully trusted" -ROTFL "Optionally disable logins on Sunday, the day of rest" -What about the Seventh Day Adventists? "No encryption provided; Christians have nothing to hide" -...Right. Lemme just go ahead and see your CC#'s, and SSN. Is that serious? I wonder how long tripod (lycos) will carry on?
This useless space for sale, inquire at front desk.
I'd say there's a good chance Google will still be around in 10 years.
You know what, 10 years ago, I'd have said that there'd be a good chance that AltaVista will still be around in 10 Years!
If you don't know what AltaVista is then you might want to Google it. 10 years ago, you'd likely have AltaVista'd Google to find out what Google was!
AltaVista is still around but it's a subsidiary of Google. I'm not saying that Google won't be around in 10 years... I'm just saying that 10 years is a long time in Internet time!
Talking of which, does anyone else remember Internet Time?
I wonder if they'll see off the domain name? Heck, why not sell it all off to someone interested in keeping it going? Unfortunately, I'll bet the market for virtual real estate is as bleak as it is for "real" real estate.
Dark Reflection
"lowest-common-denominator", like the people who can't tell "it's" from "its"?
("... contributed to it's demise ...")
My first web page was on Geocities - http://www.geocities.com/WallStreet/1928 . Page info says it was last modified 10/17/1995 10:29:40 PM - over 13 years ago. It's a page of links to other pages on Noam Chomsky, because the main page out on the net at that time was down at that time. Every link is now broken (except perhaps the Usenet one). I even have gopher links in there. Can't say the net has improved much since then - the level of intelligent discussion has lessened, so in most ways it is worse.
Totally. My original websites are (mercifully) lost to the void, but I learned a WHOLE lot through trial and error in those GeoCities days.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
If you don't maintain it, they will leave.
Seems like every GeoCities page is coming back:
Sorry, Service Temporarily Unavailable. The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Additionally, a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Please check the URL for proper spelling and capitalization. If you're having trouble locating a destination on Yahoo!, try visiting the Yahoo! home page or look through a list of Yahoo!'s online services. Also, you may find what you're looking for if you try searching below.
Unless we slashdotted their butts..
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
From your mouth to God's ears. I can't stand all the news sites right now. Twitter this and twitter that. *barf*
Years ago I started a site there to put out information about my flight sim (nothing great, in fact, nothing much any more, just a redirect to my blog).
What amazes me is that after about 3 or 4 years, I still get 1 or 2 hits with geocities.com/ehud42 in the referring URL!
It is sad to see it go in a mild, nostalgic sort of way.
RIP. May your users find happier places to display their wares without the annoying ads...
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
Straying a bit from the topic, but this story made me wonder: what are the best free webhosting services nowadays?
Circumcision is child abuse.
I'd say there's a good chance Google will still be around in 10 years. I'd say there's very little chance Facebook is. And I'd say there's not a snowball's chance in Hell that Twitter is around in 5 years, never mind 10.
Do you have any evidence for these statements, or do you just happen to like Google and hate the other two(like a good /.er should)?
Google's likely to stick around because it's so large, and still trends very well. They do a lot of innovative things, and lots of us are using them for our email. They'll very likely change, and we might not think of them as a Search company (exclusively) anymore, but they'll be around. So here, I agree with you.
Facebook is huge, but then again, so was Myspace in 2003. Of course, Myspace hasn't gone anywhere - it's just not as trendy as Facebook. I agree that social networking will lose some luster, but for huge numbers of the internet population, social networking of some sort is a prime reason to be online. This is especially true in the younger set, and there's just going to be more of them. Facebook might not be a big player in 10 years. Maybe it'll adapt/create some sort of open standard for social networking. There's no way it'll just be gone.
Twitter's interesting - it's a very new service and an honestly new type of thing online. I think it'll change and might be unrecognizable by users today, but there's no reason to think it'll disappear - it's very useful for its intended purpose, and there's a lot of evidence to support that it's in a prime position to replace group chat (think IRC, chatrooms, etc). It certainly has a lot of the same functionality.
If you'd asked people in 2000 about some crazy new thing called "blogging" (especially people on slashdot), a bunch would have said it was just a boring trend that would disappear before long. It's evolved, and so will Twitter and Facebook. Don't let the irrational slashdot hate of the two services cloud your judgment.
More like a filing cabinet of polaroids. My "friends" on Facebook often take 50+ photos of every single event and post them all. Most of the pictures aren't even worth saving. (Such as the ones with me in them :)
> AltaVista is still around but it's a subsidiary of Google. I'm guessing you mean Overture or Yahoo, but that just reinforces the mindshare Google has!
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Google lost the franchise wars against AltaVista.
I saved a list of all neighborhoods , I'm really saddened by the decisions, because I think fondly of those sites. I know for a fact a lot of dead people left pages there, I remember a deceased five year old little girl that was fan of sailor moon. Romanticizing, I think of it like tearing apart the ruins of an old city because it's not worth the cost of maintenance.
The simple Geocities sidebar ads are no challenge for Adblock to terminate with extreme prejudice. :)
I recall when using Geocities myself, in my pre-Adblock days, just being glad to not be stuck with banners/Flash, though.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I thought they had changed the name to MySpace.
This space available.
... know that they had a geocities page at one point in the past, but haven't done anything with it in at least 10 or more years? I know I used to have a page in "siliconvalley/Heights" but I'll be damned if I remember what my login was for it. Not that the world is any worse off for it disappearing, as it had little more than warcraft II maps and a bunch of animated "under construction" gifs.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I've had a page up on Geocities since late 2003/early 2004, only casually updated [which is why I want to stick with a free host.]
Ads not a problem - I'm tempted to steer page visitors to Adblock Plus, which I already use myself.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I used to have a webpage in geocities. It was a pain to update. But after geocities changed their suscription model, it all went downhill. You can't just simply update a website without FTP.
And at the time, I couldn't afford FTP. Add intrusive ads, nasty non-standards javascript, and you have a recipe for failure.
http://archive.org/ still has copies of old GeoCities' areas I used to hang out. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You were using an 8086 then? You could probably have fished a perfectly usable 286 or 386 machine out of a hospital dumpster for free, or bought such a computer for dirt cheap. I even had a 486sx/33 chip my rich (yet not pretentious) friend handed down to me around the time GC was born, though it took me a few months to get the rest of the components.
That's cool you were doing that and remember all that stuff! I remember using NCSA mosaic in 16-color windows 3.11, and how cool the beta netscape was. And before then I was serious into BBS's.
In fact, it was because of geocities that I came up with a nifty "hosting" service (namebooster.com, now owned by some squatter) that would allow you to have a domain name, and have it take you to a painfully long geocities URL. At first I did it in cgi, but then I learned apache rewrite rules that made it easier to manage. I didn't really make any money off of that, but it did open the door to some crazy adventures I encountered shortly after during the .com boom.
Geocities ( and Tripod ) were the first webservers that allowed a newbie HTML programmer like me to build and host my first and primitive web site ... way back in 1997
I feel sad that Geocities is now gone ! May it rest in peace ... somewhere in the Internet Archives and in our hearts
Insight into much, Influence over nothing !
Goodbye http://geocities.com/dbz_final_flash/
You taught me how to roleplay.
Goodbye http://geocities.com/dbchronicles/
You taught me how to make my own roleplaying games.
Goodbye http://news.cnet.com/GeoCities-porn-ads-spark-controversy/2100-1023_3-225226.html
You taught me that too much roleplaying means I should be spending my time on better things, like clicking porn ads.
the top google result for "vim regex" is a geocities page, and a useful one at that.
Geocities was a haven for malware. Antivirus alerts from Geocities were getting frequent. After investigating I found these were bogus results from search engines trying to get users to visit the free hosted malware. I blocked all access at the firewall seven years ago and out of hundreds of users, only once was access needed. They used the cached Google page. Am I the only one that thinks Geocities was an out-of-control crapware hosting service?
Way back, I had figured out how to block ads from a Geocities page: I simply added <FONT COLOR=WHITE><PLAINTEXT> at the end of every HTML page. PLAINTEXT is the ultimate HTML tag. It completely disables all further parsing till the end of the document. I added this in 2003, and it has lasted till today.
I first put up a Geocities page in late 2003/early 2004, as a high-school class at the time had exposed me to simple hand-coding of HTML.
It has been updated since them, but sparsely.
Geocities was/is great to post a small amount of material with minimal hassle, and be able to post most filetypes (although I admit that I couldn't run PHP with it)
Had WYSIWYG tools, but could also code-it-yourself.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Geocities was one of the first online communities that I really participated in. I remember the fun I had setting up my first homepage in Cape Canaveral.
I was on there just the other day looking up some STVOY trivia:
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/9299/index.html
As we mourn the loss of an old friend, tonight the Hamster does not Dance.
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
...I mean, how often can you tell that a web site will be utter crap before you even visit it simply based off the web host?
R.I.P., Geocities, the web just got 10% better...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I still have a geocities email account, from 95ish or so, I tied it into my yahoo account whenever they first allowed that. Sure I only ever receive spam on it, but there is a part of me that would be sad to lose my oldest remaining email address (my first aol account has long since passed away).
The way I see social networking and blogging etc. in the future is distributed using open protocols, much like email and jabber is now eg. without totally central control... well I certainly hope all the people stop putting all their personal information into a single corporate database.
But I'm probably wrong...
Word, bro. I still remember my geocities link had a Tokyo in it :) If it wasn't for geocities, I wouldn't have my job now.
I'm bummed. They put the ads on the side and I could just upload my pages. Clunky but free. --
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;
Sure the mail gets dumped into a garbage Yahoo account, but it was nice not having to give out the real address.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
What a pity! I also learned HTML code there. My first serious site was also at Geocities. It was easily made, readily updated, and accessible.
However....
The problem came, for me, when I tried to update it one day and, somehow, the login and password details had 'morphed'. No, I had not forgotten them! The next problem was that, while I tried for several months at first, then every six months or so since, I have been unable to get ANY reponse from Geocities so-called 'help-desk' (or 'management') to resolve the matter. Not one response!
Hence, my site remains, a testiment to '90s site tastes, but only due to inattention through inability to update, OR DELETE (or get Geocities to delete), the site. And, no, I will not be giving its address.
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
I hope so. At the very least, then stuff like Facebook's constant interface changes would not annoy people (as you would just use your own personalized (web?) client). Really the idea of any one company's servers be a single point of failure for a service seems silly. From an internet architecture point of view, tying a service to a specific set of servers run by a select few seems silly if not plain ridiculous. Ex. Imagine if, say, AT&T ran e-mail. (Then again, some people mainly use Facebook messages instead of e-mail...)
There are some problems with such an approach, though. The main one I can think of is how to handle an equivalent of Facebook's networks (which essentially comes down to groups defined by people in the group or by controlling an e-mail address in a specific domain) across multiple servers. Jabber already seems to handle spam okay (in that I have never gotten spam on any Jabber account), but that might be due to its relatively small size and that IM spam is pretty rare anyway.
Centralization breaks the internet.
Witness the Fierce beauty of this Soon to be Lost Art form:
Evangelion Runescape Clan
...I ran a Pokemon fansite on Geocities which offered midis of the game's music, tips (really just reading Tips&Tricks and putting it on my site, kind of like blogs), information on the different versions and ROMs of the Gameboy games. I got my first Cease and Desist letter, ever, from Nintendo. Because of my Geocities site.
Geocities, you will forever be in my heart.
I'm glad I heard about this. It encouraged me to track down my sister's decade-old GeoCities site and download a mirror. It's fun to have not just as a keepsake, but as a reminder of how insanely far the 'net has come since then!
I don't think there will be a 'Google' in ten years, I am more thinking there will be a 'Google-Starbucks-Boeing-WalMart-America-China' super entity that reigns over the known universe and controls everything via an AI named 'GORT-Hal-Skynet.'
Luckily for us, I think we will still have the real Arnold Schwarzenegger for defense, and if not, we will always have digitized CGI models of him to wage binary wars on the new GooMartBucksWangCletusPlane superstructure....
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
All your Google are belong to Google?
-AD 2001
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
the blink tag can be deprecated /sigh
There still is.
I just caught an old Airwolf episode and thought "yikes.. who was that girl?".. that girl was Jill Whitlow. Huh. Let's google her.
#1: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Whitlow
#2: www.geocities.com/jillwhitlowfan/index.htm
#3 and all the rest: utter f'ing database-generated crap. Let's take the "tv.com" one;
http://www.tv.com/jill-whitlow/person/31200/summary.html
No biography, no photos, no trivia, no quotes. The *only* actual information in there is her credits - which are leeched off of other sites(!)
The same applies to pretty much all of the remaining results.
I'm gonna go archive that geocities site now - exactly as the summary suggests, as a *great* volume of information (in general, not just this Whitlow page) would be lost (presuming archive.org has failed to cache much of it / will stop serving the cached information if Yahoo decide to drop a disallowing spiders directive in there.).
Last year I taught a course in basic web design for students at a Native American tribal college. They needed web space for the course, which the college wasn't in a position to provide. Given the poverty in their community I wasn't going to ask them to use a paid service, even at an amount that bourgeois Slashdotters find trivial.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Who cares about the ugly designs? They were "ugly" because people actually had the freedom to upload whatever they wanted, and who goes to the internet to watch "pretty" things anyway, especially 15 years ago, when you couldn't find 2 browsers that would show a page the same way?
For the younger generation (I was 13), who hadn't been to college, we only had a dial-up connection and no way to know about ftp, gopher, usenet, etc; geocities gave us a way to experiment and learn how the internet worked.
Today everything is trapped inside something else (facebook, myspace, blogging platforms, news sites), does anyone understand what happens with their data after they publish it? where does it go, where does it come from when it shows up on their browser?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
They can't shut it down, my site is still under construction!
It was my start in writing HTML code and now I'm a full-time web developer.
It was my start in writing HTML too, and now I'm a scarred-for-life systems developer!
It's kind of amazing really. If you think about it, the scope of Geocities was likely huge, requiring what must have been, for the time, a colossal amount of bandwidth and hardware to handle the traffic being served by all those users.
Now, however, since it's largely static pages with some minor ad munging, you could probably serve the entirety of their content from a single server, largely from memory, without a lot of fuss.
We've come a long way from Geocities' (almost) static pages in 1995 to our current 'request per user per second' dynamically updating AJAX-enabled user-generated socially-networked drop-shadow rounded-corner web-font lifestyle. Time marches ever onward, and while there's something to be said for simplicity, it's hard to fathom a website that doesn't change any time I do something with it.
Yahoo could make a kind of contest, asking people to vote for their favorite GeoCIties page, and Yahoo could then save them for posterity. Let's say, the top 500 rated pages. This would also mean that those are the most visited pages, so there would be some profit from the ads on them. But most importantly, this would generate a lot of traffic for Yahoo, and a lot of buzz around their services. In general, it would be a good PR move without almost any cost.
What does Yahoo do, instead? Let's knife the whole thing. Yeah, that's smart.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Ah, but do you remember AltaVista before they bought the altavista.com domain name? It used to be altavista.digital.com! Of course DEC became Compaq which became HP, and as others have corrected you, Yahoo! now owns AltaVista.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Hey, the watch I use on a daily basis (a Swatch Microsoft SPOT/MSN Direct watch) still does Internet Time.
I sing the doggie electric!
Windows only!
Thanks, but no thanks....
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
Often, when researching into old-ish (70s-80s) cameras and lenses, I stumble on really extensive pages on geocities or some other free service.
The resources we often enough unique and extremely informative. I should have considered mirroring them right then and there - now might be too late.
Is there any chance that the "good" stuff might have been mirrored to archive.org or something like that?
You had internet access on your 8086?
No, he had sneakernet access, if you RTFP.
My brother-in-law was using an 8080-based Amstrad POS well into the early '90s (whilst I had an Amiga 500+). We tend to forget just how primitive things were in those days. I remember reading the spec for LucasArts' "The Dig" and wondering how many people could afford to have such a kick-ass system at home for playing games.
By the time I created my first GeoCities page ('97 or '98), I was using a similar system as described above. I had a hand-me-down Windows 3.1 PC at home (no net connection) and used my work's internet access to upload the hand-cranked HTML files and hand-optimised GIFs. It wasn't until 2000 that I had a Windows 98 machine and dial-up access from home.
Squirrel!
Google's likely to stick around because it's so large, and still trends very well.
WTF does that even mean ? Speak English, boy !
Squirrel!
I'll sure miss it. I remember fondly how I could give my friend Timmy Schneider a ceisure from the other end of the planet, just by giving him the URL to any given Geocities site. *sigh* Those were the days man....
"Sarcasm is for *winners*, Alan." - Charlie Harper (Two and a Half Men)
Geocities was a progression for me as they later allowed SSI. This moved me over from frame based layout. From there I quickly hopped over to my own domain with PHP and was totally geeked out with include_once()!
I went back to the site and added meta-redirect to forward people to my blog. Must check my server logs and see if anyone comes that way.
So, where's their backup? Nowhere? Don't tell me they just ditched 15 years of early Internet history, when the whole archive could probably hold on a single hard drive?
You just got troll'd!
Are small hosting services like that even necessary anymore? For those who just want to post content online, all they have to do is start a blog or get an account at one of the many Web 2.0 sites (MySpace, Facebook, etc.) available nowadays. I recall the advertisements being a bit irritating. Heck, the ads on the Web 2.0 sites now are irritating (hence AdBlock). I recall some GeoCities pages being useful. I even used them to do some research for homework back in middle and high school. Now I primarily use Wikipedia and Google for my researching needs.
Wow, you've been trolled. Look at the grandparent's user ID. It is not kdawson, it is 'kdawson (3715)'. If it were the real kdawson, I'd agree (although, since I've blocked kdawson articles from the front page for about a year, I don't know if they've improved recently).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If you don't know what AltaVista is then you might want to Google it. 10 years ago, you'd likely have AltaVista'd Google to find out what Google was!
Yup, that's what I did nine years ago when someone first mentioned Google to me. Altavista was on its way out then though. The main search page had become so bloated that it took over 30 seconds to load on my modem. I switched to Google immediately because it took about two seconds to load.
That said, if you'd told me ten years ago that Yahoo! would still be around and have a market capitalisation of over $20bn in ten years time, I probably would not have believed you. The difference between Altavista and the other search engines is that Altavista had no business model. It was an advert for the Alpha, and once Intel persuaded HP to kill the Alpha it had no reason to continue to exist.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Not exactly. Geocities had a little useful content hidden amongst the rubbish. Back then, most browsers had a button that would turn off images and a setting that ignored the page's font instructions (Opera still does, with a few other fun stylesheets - my favourite makes the page look like you are browsing on a C64) and with this a lot more of Geocities became usable. The markup on MySpace is generally so unstructured that there is no way of turning it into readable text.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Exactly what I was going to suggest. Of course, any self-respecting geek will already have their own server in a colo somewhere, but if you don't then NFS is a really great solution for low-volume hosting. You only pay for what you use, and it's pre-pay so you never get charged vast amounts if your site is slashdotted.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...that honor actually goes to Joe's Amazing Instant Home Pages (by the same guy who was the victim of the first Joe job, henceforth named after him). Unchanged since 1996 or so. Still active (!). You get one page. No graphics except some stock ones. That's real nostalgia there.
But Coke was replaced by Gooke Beta. With personalized taste, based on your past Google searches.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You can add those buttons to most modern browsers:
https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Man, I sort of assumed Geocities must have ceased to exist back in the nineties, as more and more consumer ISPs started offering web hosting as part of their service package. In my mind, Geocities is closely associated with unnecessary framesets and "Get Netscape Navigator 3.0 Now" banners.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I hosted my first webpage on Geocities back in 1995. It was where I learned html back when Netscape 1.1 was still cutting edge. I imagine more than a few web designers cut their teeth on this service. So it may be tempting to mock it for its simplicity and general cheesiness, but in 1995 EVERYTHING on the internet was simple and cheesy. And, IIRC, there was nothing else at the time that offered such a great opportunity to poor, wannabe webmasters (that was back when paid web hosting cost a LOT more than a $6 a month GoDaddy account, and Geocities was offering space for FREE). The skills I learned at Goecities landed me several jobs, and put me miles ahead of the competition back when saying "Oh, and I can design webpages too" really set you apart from everyone else.
RIP Geocities, from a former Athens resident.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yahoo originally bought Geocities for something like 3-5 billion dollars. Why not sell it to another company. Yahoo could perhaps avoid having to lay off another 700 people if they made a few million dollars on it.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
I always thought that the ads were a reasonable trade off for the service being free. I mean, people shouldnt complain about ads on a free service, since they help keep the service going to it can be free. I am really quite angered by the move Yahoo has made and hope that maybe they consider to keep existing material online.
It was never a rubbish service. The ads were a reasonable trade off for a free service. People really should not complain about ads on a free service because its what allows the service to be provided for free. I still think that web page hosting is still important and there are things that can be done with it that cant be done with facebook. Shutting down Geocities is a really dumb decision. There is a lot of important content on Geocities that really should be archived somewhere. This is an example of what many have expressed concern about, that the cultural records and legacy of an entire era is dissappearing as a result of computer data being deleted.
I believe you are referring to the Shipstone Corporation.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I take comfort in knowing we'll have Weyland-Yutani (not yet sure how this will form), Blue Sun (probably after IBM buys Oracle's Sun) and Wal-Mart. A little competition is good, even amongst evil corporations.
I just have logged in to see if I can download and back up all my files at once. Have not found any word about the closing action. Is it me, or is it the lack of consideration at Yahoo?
...a stunned silence fell upon the hall.
I was still using a 8088 in 1990, but it died one tragic day in 1991. We replaced it with a 286 for $100. Calling those days "primitive" isn't as accurate. In those days, some people didn't understand that it was often cheaper to upgrade than repair, and those who didn't read the trade mags or walk into a game store didn't know about new software whose minimum requirements vastly surpassed our systems. My parents didn't see the point in upgrading a functional computer so I could play more computer games.
Windows 3.1 required protected memory, which required at least a 386. A 386, of course, was worlds better than any 8080, even if you have some affection for Amstrad. It was certainly possible to get an ISP for less than $10/month in 1998, and a 9600 modem for around that same amount. A name brand 56k modem set me back $60 in 1999.
The point to your parent's post was not what you could do with old equipment, but the value of spending a little more money and what you could do with it. Nobody's picking on your Amstrad, the point is that a little more money could have gotten a big upgrade in horsepower and gotten you on the web -- which you already know based on your Win98 machine.
http://geocities.yahoo.co.jp/ For some odd reason, Japanese Geocities sites are still up and running. I think it might have something to do with the Harajuku generation...
You were using an 8086 then? You could probably have fished a perfectly usable 286 or 386 machine out of a hospital dumpster for free
Not everybody lives in the US. Over here (Uruguay), you cannot find a 386 for free NOW, forget about the 1990s.
And I did have a modem in the family 8086 Acer 500 computer at the time Geocities launched (no Internet though).
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Ah, but do you remember AltaVista before they bought the altavista.com domain name?
Heck, I remeber using Archie.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
I'd like to build my neighbor a simple website that allows him to give potential customers a list of what he does, and show a few pictures. What's a good free website hosting site that would be comparable to GeoCities. I am a backend programmer so web design is not my strong suit, but I'd like to give him something to get him started... something he can update himself. I was thinking of just using Facebook, but I'm thinking he'd eliminate a lot of potential viewers.
And Facebook is it right now. MySpace and Friendster are top-dog in their own lesser spheres. The whole point of networking is have all the people you are interested in connected to the same system.
I'm preserving my site with wget. This set of options seems to be the best I can come up with, although I would like to find a way to make --page-requisites work as well so as to preserve the icons and junk I linked to off of geocities' server:
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Not sure I'd want to go digging thru a hospital dumpster.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
... former AOL users are now highly respected forum writers, system administrators and network engineers.
It's been 15.1 years since AOL appeared on USENET.
Darn, I'm really old!
The real value of geocities was not in the actual content it contained (although some of the content was simply awesome), but rather how it encouraged a lot of individuals to start publishing content onto the web via a personal home page. Both the skills learned and the desire to get oneself "one the Internet" that geocities (and its kin websites) provided were launchpads into the web we know now.
There's still Web Pages That Suck. :)
And the Chinese webmasters and users still believe in a "busy" front page.
Even portals reflect that mentality. Examples:
It is rare indeed for Chinese websites to be minimalist. Examples:
So will Yahoo offer a way to d/l your site without subscribing? Other then the manual process. Maybe offer free FTP until they close their doors?
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Thing is, Facebook is starting to absorb a lot of the time people spend on the internet. It has e-mail, picture sharing, link sharing, online gaming (Scrabble, anyone?), and more besides. Facebook is conglomerating all the silly, useless time-wasters into one convenient place and interface, and this has a lot of value for everyday folk surfing the web. I think Facebook might have more longevity than you think.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
The article is missing the tag: andnothingofvaluewaslost
kthxbye
Internet scofflaw
Ah, just like myspace.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
No it's not. Altavista is owned by yahoo. I am reminded of this fact constantly, because my ping connectivity test has gone from google.com to av.com.
Saving me four letters per use, this represents one of the better suggestions I've found on slashdot, one I use daily.
user@example:~$ ping av.com
PING av.com (206.190.60.37) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from w2.rc.vip.re4.yahoo.com (206.190.60.37): icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=34.6 ms
As far as Swatch internet time goes, I bought a Swatch MSN Direct (remember that?) watch for $20 last year. It was fun, sort of, for the novelty, but not for the size of the charger.
Or the frequency of the charging.
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
Jabber already seems to handle spam okay (in that I have never gotten spam on any Jabber account)
I've gotten a lot of spam on MSN IM. Using social engineering the convince people to "log in" to a site using their msn login. In the EULA you give them the rights to use your account to promote their services.
My idea of a social network is pretty much the same as email is today. You could pay for blog hosting etc, host it yourself on your computer or use any of the free services (facebook, myspace compared to gmail, hotmail).
I think the distribution is really important to the future of the web... I'm glad I'm not the only one with that point of view