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Geocities Shutting Down Today
Paolo DF writes "Geocities is closing today. Its advent in 1995 was a sign of the rising 'Internet for everyone' era, when connection speeds were 1,000x or 2,000x slower than is common today. You may love it or hate it, but millions of people had their first contact with a Web presence right here. I know that Geocities is something that most Slashdotters will see as a n00b thing — the Internet was fine before Geocities — but nevertheless I think that some credit is due. Heck, there's even a modified xkcd homepage to mark the occasion." Reader commodore64_love notes a few more tributes around the Web. Last spring we discussed Yahoo's announcment that Geocities would be going away.
Most memories of Grandpa have been archived. It's time to pull the plug. RIP you browser crashing old coot.
My work here is dung.
Let's not get all full of ourselves here. We might go way back, but to say that the majority of Slashdotters were online BEFORE Geocities is probably stretching it. I was on the Internet before 1995, and I don't think of Geocities as a "n00b thing." 14 years ago isn't exactly a blink of the eye.
My recollection was that anything hosted on a geocities page was trojan riddled junk. If a site somehow actually gained popularity, it was defaced overnight due to the poor security geocities provided.
They where kinda the AOL of the web....
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
The promise of my website being "under construction" never came true. It's probably been taken down, havn't looked at it since about '99. Damn... over 10 years. I'm getting old.
Much like MySpace and Facebook are the first online foray for young adults & kids now, GeoCities was at one time the first entry point for many of us.
I remember reading a magazine telling all about this new thing called the "World Wide Web", and one of the highlighted links (yes, a magazine printed a list of links) was GeoCities. I was on of the first users at the time and setup my site, www.geocities.com/MotorCity/1108, at the time. In fact, this was my second site since the first I forgot the login for... much like low UIDs, not one valued low geocities addresses back then, and I'm not sure if they ever did.
It was an awesome introduction to HTML and I think served a lot of us very well.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
WTF! Didn't they see my gif saying my site was under construction!
Fat Cat: I'd commemorate this by linking to my page on Geocities, but, well...
Have you read my journal today?
Heck, there's even a modified xkcd homepage to mark the occasion.
I almost forgot why I stayed away from geocities hosted websites whenever possible.
Thanks xkcd for reminding me one last time!
Heck, there's even a modified xkcd homepage to mark the occasion."
<HTML WEB="2.0">
<HEAD>
<TITLE>
...
</HTML>
GOTO 10
You know it makes sense, a little reminder from jointm1k.
But I don't know if its Nostalgia or Relief...
I think it's too bad. Geocities really did make it easy to get a web page online, and is arguably, still one of the easiest ways for *anybody* to get information out there. The beauty of the early web was that there was a lot of weird information that was often maintained by a single person with a passion for, say, peanut butter flavored roller skates. I see the web becoming increasing homogenized today, with lots and lots of interlinking, and less interesting, weird unique content. Despite their annoying JS ads, I'll still miss Geocities.
I don't respond to AC's.
Is that a javascript'ed blink "tag" they are using? I thought most browsers didn't acknowledge that tag in HTML anymore...
And why on earth am I seeing a banner ad here on the slashdot comment page that says geocities?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Long live the rotating,flaming skull!
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
I'm a noob I s'pose; geocities was my entry into the internet. For me, that was how I learned all the HTML codes: I would type in what I thought would look good, check out the end result, then go back and fix it up. Most of the content wasn't that good, but you could find all sorts of little gems with enough searching. Can't even recall how many custom Doom/Heretic levels I found thanks to geocities...
I'm going to miss Jesux, the born-again Linux.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
I'll miss you http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/5568/index.html. You taught me HTML which helped me get my first IT job, and helped girls stalk me 8 years later after I forgot you existed, because in my pupal years, I had no concerns of privacy. May your green background with blinking red letters sleep soundly knowing they successfully burned over 200,000 retinas (according to my web counter) if people clicked on the "Don't click on this link!" link.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
...I guess you could say this is the end of an error?
the countdown to the demise of Facebook! Can't happen soon enough. 'Nuff said.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
So Long and Thanks for all the Blink Tags!
Hah. I came to /. today just to see if someone had posted the xkcd geocities tribute. Everything from the background, the revolving "@" symbol, the under construction GIFs, and especially the malformed HTML coming across as text content, is exceptionally well done.
It's called CSS. You might want to learn it sometime.
<TD><FONT COLOR="#bababa"><span style="text-decoration:blink;"><BLINK><A HREF="http://dynamic.xkcd.com/random/comic/" id="rnd_btn_t">rAnDoM</A></span></BLINK>
XKCD has a lovely tribute to it today as well.
... which it says in the summary. I know a lot of people on here don't RTFA, but to not read the summary either??? What exactly do you read?
The thing I find most disturbing about that "tribute"...
It renders!
Check out the source code, good stuff:
{HTML WEB="2.0"}
{SCRIPT LANGUAGE="QBASIC">IF $BROWSER = "IE" THEN GOTO 50{/SCRIPT}
{TABLE BORDER="5" CELLPADDING="5" SHELL="REGEDIT.EXE"}
I am hopeful that any information I may need that was only ever hosted on some guy's Geocities site (probably in SiliconValley) has been archived. There is a lot of it, from information about microcontroller programming to Old English word lists and grammar lessons, that up to last week I ended up at some geocities.com address for. It hosted a lot more than just nested blink and marquee tags.
We often overlook the idea of using web sites as a form of expression, but that's exactly what a lot of the self-made websites were back then. And I remember seeing a lot of really amazing layouts being made by people who otherwise had no interest in anything techy, a little after CSS hit the mainstream.
Say what you will, but Geocities got a lot of young people - myself included - to get their hands dirty with web design. I, for one, will miss it.
I'm using Opera - both blink and scroll are working ;)
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
How many links are going to broken after today? Then again, is there anything out there that hasn't been improved and stored away somewhere else?
import system.cool.Sig;
Those eyesores were kinda comforting.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Anyone notice that Yahoo mail was down for hours just now? Suppose that had something to do with geocities going offline? Wondering if it only affected geocities site owners.
Quick test with Firefox 3.5.3 and a file with only
<blink>TEST</blink>
as content proofs: web standards are for pussies, real browsers handle everything.
I first started on some site I can't even remember but it was super basic so I moved to Tripod and then also opened up some stuff on Geocities.
There was a load of shit on Geocities especially after Yahoo bought them but it was also full of tons of useful info. After all that's all some people had to share info and all sites were ugly even if most were but let's face it the web in general is a bit ugly compared to now.
Geocities could at least give people a platform to learn web design and development. You don't get that really with most social sites these days and most people's myspace site is ugly as sin so in some ways we haven't really advanced.
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Exceptionally well done, hurt my eyes and gave me a headache, and reminded me why I started avoiding Geocities a long time ago.
We don't need Geocities to remember what the web looked like in the 1990's.
We can all remember what the web used to look like in the 1990's just by continuing to use IE6. Thanks corporate America (and Grandma) for helping us remember what the web looked like over a decade ago.
Jason-Palmer.com
"Reply to This?"
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
Well, the URL was in the summery. Wait! What?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Based on the design, it looks like slashdot is marking the occasion too....what....it always looks like this?
you must be new here.
rewriting history since 2109
All of those pop-ups and banner ads is the reason why I steered clear of Geocities. I made certain to exclude Geocities from all internet searches. If you pop an ad up in my face I will make a personal note never to buy, promote, or recommend the advertised item.
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver --Proverbs 25:11
Geocities wasn't all that different from MySpace and Facebook: it gave people a simple way to create a web presence. It was lacking the "viral" aspect of the social networking sites, but arguably, that may have been a good thing...
Although it seems like ages ago now, Geocities was my first web presence. In my youth I set up a web site dedicated to wolves, I can’t even recall the name of it, but I was in high school and Geocities was free, the perfect fit. It helped me develop a foreign language called HTML and gave me a basic understanding of websites. Although I eventually out grew the site and moved on to dedicated hosting solutions for future endeavors, it is still sad to see the service close.
While there are some obvious limitations to Geocities and the very annoying advertisements you could not beat the price, great starter service.
Goodbye Geocities, you'll be missed by me.
I have seen people not even read TFT. (The Full Title)
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
"I've... seen things you people wouldn't believe. Web pages on fire with LinkExchange banners... I've watched blink tags... glitter in the dark near Area51/Vault... All those moments will be lost... in time. Like tears... in the bitbucket... Time to shut down..."
http://www.geocities.com/darthvain/
As much as geocities is horrible I don't think it holds a candle to "Myspace" web monstrosities with music and flashing crap. Geocities was good because it was the first big thing that let you host "stuff" for free. Now freehosting services are a dime a dozen, geocities isn't really needed, not to mention the myspaces and facebooks of the world now. However back in the day, if you didn't want to pay to host your own stuff, or didn't want to mess around a lot of dynamic IPs, host updaters, and setting up a private webserver and dns server (or pay for web creation software, or even bother to learn html) for the absolute free experience for a personal web page geocities was there. Again, now there are tons of free services out there, and pay ones that are not nearly as expensive as they used to be. Most noobs used it to basically say "Hi look at me, I am on the web!" which was served by MySpace and now Facebook really. ...and before you respond yes I know my geocities site is crap and I haven't updated it in years. Don't judge me, I was weak. :)
http://www.geocities.com/wfdhayride/ I just got signed on to redo this site but I am thinking I will stay nostalgic.
~ Ron Fitzgerald
I'm going to bet 20$ on "capacity problems".
Agreed. XKCD's webpage today is both an epic fail and an epic pass.
Personally, I will raise a glass to Geocities today. It was my first personal webpage back in 1996 when I only had the Unix lab on the 5th floor of the U of Manitoba's Engineering building. Looking back the net was the wild west and Geocities was a boomtown then. Everyone had come into town and set up shop. There was some good pages, some bad pages and some truly awful pages but it was a low barrier to entry and allowed pretty much everyone to sort this new world out.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Several people have said "Geocities gave people their first exposure to web design."
Web Design? How about "Web cobble-together-with-used-duck-tape-and-old-bubblegum" (and yes, I meant to use "duck" rather than "duct").
Geoshitties encouraged almost every BAD idea for web site implementation there was.
So, I give a "NOT fond regards" (~73) to Geoshitties - sing it with me:
Na Na Na Na
Na NA NA NA
Hey Hey Hey
GoodBye!
www.eFax.com are spammers
I liked the IE5 icon next to the text recommending Netscape Navigator 4.7 in 800x480.
Yeah, but it was bad in a harmless, almost innocent way. Not like MySpace which is plain offensive.
Geocities was a primary school kid drawing a fire engine, that sort of thing. Myspace is a bunch of secondary school kids repeatedly etching their names into the bus windows.
Geocities, the fastest-closing site on the web!
XKCD is on the ball.
http://xkcd.com/
I almost puked.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Just gives an empty box, what do I type?
:wq
hmm
^D
meh
^X^C
nope.. ah, "Submit"?
We arrive back at the same old argument: basic tool that meets the need versus a fancy tool that provides more than what you need. Geocities, Windows XP, and the Chevrolet Cobalt are in the 1st category. Facebook (and MySpace), Windows 7, and BMW 328 are in the second category.
I still remember back when you didn't have to have a domain to be taken seriously. Magazines would list informative websites that were hosted on geocities. More often than not, though, you'd wind up at a page written by a wannabe anarchist or a script kiddie. This page would look horrible, have some 50kb .wav greeting you, and almost always have a black or .gif background. Yes, that includes my own geocities page from back in 96.
Yes, geocities. You were terrible. But we'll miss you anyway.
This post best viewed in Netscape Navigator.
Under construction.
010013 hits and counting!
Part of the kuribo post webring.
No portion of this post may be rebroadcast without the express, written consent of Major League Baseball.
i would never have known that ninjas are mammals
http://www.realultimatepower.net/ninja/ninja2.htm
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Also, obligatory xkcd reference: http://xkcd.org/
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
A car analogy! Of course! Now I understand :D
text-docoration:blink is optional and usually only implemented by the evil browsers already implementing
You are joking, right?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They need a "Bottom 95% of the web" button.
I got an email from a stranger in the Philippines asking for help with a document she found on my website. I responded (somewhat begrudgingly), she thanked me. I followed a link to her Geocities homepage in her signature line, and (seeing her photos) began emailing her.
http://www.geocities.com/balene46/Photo_Gallery.html
We've been married four years now. ...and have a great toddler.
http://www.cgstock.com/personal/arlene_gregerson
http://www.cgstock.com/athena
Thanks, geocities.
www.cgstock.com
Read? Just wiggle the magic 8-ball and write something bad about Windows, good about Linux and how Macs are overpriced and you're done.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I had to learn several lines of php to get my images
dir listing working again. There's no way i
spend hours making links to over 100 images.
The web-upload interface was reason enough to pull the
plug.
Anyone know of any free sites with ftp that allow
dir listing ?
I dug the broken image links but i would have liked to see one or two hrefs point at a C: drive.
I'm still new to this Internet thing. I'm using Mosaic and I just skipped by that underline thing. (My apologies -- I can't believe I actually missed that in the summary).
Firefox renders their trickery just fine but Internet Explorer doesn't. Windows is not ready for the desktop: its browser can't even render HTML written like it's from 1995 correctly!
SSC
^Z
?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
A lot of vintage knowledge was slapped up on the easiest host possible because the old guy who still had the original manuals got them scanned and put them on the only free webspace they could find.
The other day I was looking up some info on a vintage bicycle and a lot of it came from a couple of geocities pages that were certainly pretty poor designs but they were the only place I could find full page scans of the 1974 whatever catalog.
Bottles.
Blink tags still work in IE and Firefox. I tested them recently because I was having a similar discussion with a friend.
Fortunately, they don't work on Slashdot. :)
XKCD has a lovely tribute to it today as well.
... which it says in the summary. I know a lot of people on here don't RTFA, but to not read the summary either??? What exactly do you read?
Not only that, but it even says it in the freakin' summary! I realize nobody RTFA, but you'd think GP could at least RTFS!
Geocities made me realize that it is not the medium people lack, but the talent. I would see thousands of people trying to communicate a message and it was really sad to find out that their message would be best if it wasn't communicated at all. Painters with no skill, musicians with no muse, writers who couldn't write an interesting paragraph etc.
I remember I was so optimistic about the freedom of expression and what I experienced in Geocities still remains one of the most bitter experiences about people in general. Perhaps the most. Seeing all those ungifted people patting each other in the back, refusing to accept what they created was trash it was disheartening every day.
I was raised with the philosophy that "whoever thinks freely, thinks well" and it was in Geocities that I discovered how false that is. I am thankful for that, but did it have to be so blunt?
It's as if millions of awful websites suddenly cried out and were suddenly silenced. But no one heard them because no one has actually viewed any of them in years.
Farewell Athens/Acropolis.
I remember picking my neighborhood page, throwing up useless junk about how much macs suck and PC rule, animated GIFs for IChat, ICQ and webring. Then I wrote a program that drew visitors to my page and got me recognition in the weekly geocities digests for my traffic and a couple free tshirts (I still have one in the plastic wrapper, the other I wear as casual). They gave me more webspace and bandwidth as well. Then a year or so later Yahoo bought them up and started doling out vengeance against those who had active sites. This is when GeoCities truly died. All that we saw between then and now was postmortem random nerve firing. Yahoo routinely would shut down my site with tales of "Bandwidth exceeded"
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
I felt a great disturbance in the Internet, as if millions of pages gave out an error and were suddenly silenced.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
collage?
Seereayusly?
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
text-docoration:blink is optional and usually only implemented by the evil browsers already implementing
Is that why it's implemented in Firefox but not in IE?
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
"I am hopeful that any information I may need that was only ever hosted on some guy's Geocities site (probably in SiliconValley) has been archived."
This idea that anything on the Internet shall live forever is demonstrably false. If a web page contains content you want to have forever after, save it yourself, to media you control.
Sure, that embarrassing picture of you, the chocolate pudding, and the goat will live forever, but anything YOU want to survive will vanish faster than a top quark.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I for one will miss vim regular expressions 101 I it will be moved someplace else.
1000x slower (as in less)!/10x less!/10x smaller!
ARRRGGH!!!!!
It's 1/1000th the speed. It's 1/10 the amount! It's 1/10 the size!
Please report to remedial English.
Slashdot may laugh at fanfic readers, but a lot of old classics are going poof as we speak. The things we first read when we found the web and were curious and naive are gone now. And in many cases, gone forever. A lot of amateur author's pages are going down, and a lot of good stories are going with them.
More's the pity really.
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
I just looked at the xkcd home page redone in geocities style. That is one talented web master to create a home page that managed to mimics every detail of what was bad about geocities web pages. Even right down to the x10 ad. :-)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I built my first website on Geocities way back in 1998. I spent many hours downloading what's left of the site onto a hard drive for archive purposes. I am glad to see that the site is gone since it's become a haven for spammers hosting their crap
what will happen to all of the flashing, moving, spinning GIFs. oh the humanity!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is one of the first parts of "the cloud" ... the end is nigh!!!!
Geocities ate my balls!
And why on earth am I seeing a banner ad here on the slashdot comment page that says geocities?
Because you, for reasons I really can't figure out, don't use AdBlock Plus...
I know I never acknowledged you when my friends were around, but you will always have a special place in my heart.
Geocities was very popular with phishers who needed hosting on a domain too popular to blacklist. We maintain a list of major domains being exploited by active phishing scams, and Geocities is in the #2 position for length of time on the list. Over the last few months, the number of phishing sites hosted on Geocities has slowly declined. Today, on Geocities' last day, there is only one left.
With Geocities out of action, Piczo.com (hosting/social networking for teens) and Fortunecity.com (general-purpose free hosting) become the top hosting services favored by phishers. Most of the Piczo phishing sites seem to be aimed at getting Habbo login credentials. There is apparently a whole racket which breaks into Habbo accounts to steal virtual furniture.
(We finally have all the big players off that list. When we started, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and eBay were all on that list. They've all been fixed. The "short URL" sites are now all very aggressive about killing off phishing links; they don't want to get on spam blacklists. Most of the remaining sites on the list are modest sites run by people who have no idea what's going on with their site. The oldest entry on that list, hoseo.ac.kr, is a Korean university. Someone broke into their email system last year and put a phishing site on port 8080. Their webmaster mailbox is full, but we've tried to reach them by other means and may eventually reach someone with a clue.)
Collage? Is that some sort of art school?
"But this one goes to 11!"
... when connection speeds were 1,000x or 2,000x slower than is common today
So, it's common that they're slow today, and they were 1 or 2k times more slow back then? Or is it just possible that many users' pipes are actually fast, now, and back then, they were a thousandth the speed? What the hell is it with the recent increase in this absurd way to describe relative behaviors of things? I think it was, like, a hundred times more uncommon, before.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I'm under 30 (barely), and my first exposure to the Internet was grabbing files/"surfing" at university repositories using Gopher.
And shit, I still remember sending messages using FidoNet via BBSes! Ah, once upon a time....
With the first link, the chain is forged.
That's the best analogy ever.. its so true. Geocities might not have been great but it inspired thought, creativity and learning. Even if it's ugly as hell.
Speaking as someone who has been in the anti-spam business for years, all I can say is that anyone who thinks that Geocities' being turned off will have any impact whatsoever on spam and/or phishing needs to stop and think about that. As a poster up above noted, as of today there was only one known phishing page still on Geocities. Where did all the rest go? Suffice to say, it's a safe bet they haven't retired.
I'm not against take-downs of phishing sites - it's a valuable tool in the toolbox - but it's definitely whack-a-mole and does little if anything to actually reduce phishing attempts. Shut down a phishing site and the same phisher will have a new one opened within minutes. Most phishing sites today are hosted on compromised servers, anyway. You could shut down every free website service in the world and it wouldn't make a significant difference in the amount of phishing sites. Free website services did not create phishers or spammers, they are just abused by (some of) them. If they were all gone, the phishers and spammers would just abuse another channel.
I used famvid.com as my first ISP, and they offered unlimited web hosting with the $12.95 per month ISP price. I never believed that it was "unlimited" but they never complained no matter how much crap I uploaded.
I visited tons of geocities sites, though. Linked them from my own as well.
Free Martian Whores!
There is a lot of history packed into those pages, regardless of visual aesthetics. Does anyone remember Expage? It was a much more obscure place to make simple sites, but they closed down without much notice and apparently nobody bothered to archive those sites--including some that had a lot of content worthy of saving and a few I had created and wish I had saved.
http://www.geocities.com/aberguerand/frmain.htm
Let's see how long it will last.
all your base are . us / to belong
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
In 1995 I had a 5Mbps up and 5Mbps down cable connection with a static IP address for $50 per month.
Now to get just 1Mbps up and a static IP address I have to pay $120 per month.
Speeds are much lower now than they were in the glory days like 1995. I don't think it will ever be as good as it was then.
Webring was the way I found most geocities sites. As far as I know it's still alive and well.
I'll always have some nostalgia for the Web 1.0 days. I remember my younger days when building a website for its own sake was a nerds' rite of passage, at least among my friends. That, and whole sites - not just pages, sites - were less than 250 kilobytes. (They HAD to be.)
Thanks to blogging and MySpace, it's a lot easier now to get your fifteen minutes of fame online, but the real magic of building your own page from scratch - something only a small and peculiar subset of the average shmuck would ever be stimulated by - is completely and utterly gone. Not only that, it's not unusual for single pages to weigh in at multiple megabytes. There are single MySpace pages out there that are larger than the space limits of Geocities circa 2000 - 2004. That's crazy.
But it's still the same old crap. We still have the equivalent of clip-art in the form of sparkling text generators and Blingee, Flash has outshone the venerable .gif and old fashioned Javascript, and MIDI and WAV have given way to MP3s. Only now, the stupidity isn't exclusive to the geek caste, it's even more uniform and multiple times more grotesque, and whereas DSL and cable might have been considered luxuries once upon a time, thanks to sites like these they're a necessity! One longs for the dial-up days. With the sole exception of wikis and streaming media, it's my honest opinion that the Internet as a social experience and an information resource hasn't evolved one iota since 1995. Alas, the ivory tower of adolescent geekdom has fallen, long after it outlived its usefulness to the E-proletariat.
I remember actually siting geocities pages as a source on my middle school papers. In heinsight that was probably a bad idea.
I remember using freewebs.com to make webpages when I was in middle school...or even worse the free webpage that earthlink gave us.
Wow I was so proud of my stupid earthlink webpage...with its site counter, guest book, and all that crazy stuff. I learned html from that kind of stuff and damn was I proud of my incredibly dumb web pages. I remember having midi auto playing music and a stupid cursor effect.
The almost invisible blue hyperlinks on the patterned black background was what made it a real Geocities page for me. That and the "Best viewed in Netscape Navigator" link on the bottom.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
There's still a lot of rare content put on Geocities years ago that would be worthwhile to preseve. E.G. Want to build a Scanning Tunneling Microscope for under 100$? Check out:
http://www.geocities.com/spm_stm/
I really hope an archive of this content is being kept.
GeoCities is my second homepage since the first one, in the unversitiy, here Rio has many failures on their servers in 1995/1996. Every brazilian or not vistis this page because there was always something new like the IRC pages. I got the beginning of this era and I still have a geocities.com email stating as the oldest active email, now an alias to my Yahoo account. I don't know if these aliases will be shutted down with the service. But I backed up the entire page so, maybe I can put them online on anoter hosting.
So, you can Slashdot it as one of the last tribute of Geocities visiting http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/7479 . Don't worry if you cannot understand Portuguese. There is also an English version.
Thanks Geocities and Goobye!
Everyone is just being nostalgic. Yeah, suck it in and remember a dead friend.
But who cares in the end? The Internet is about disposable information and this things time has come and gone. The Internet is more diverse and enjoyable than ever. Lets stop pretending it was better back in the day.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Knew for months it was closing down, finished the backup at ~ 11:30 PM Pacific Time on the 25th.
My page is still up, so presumably, they close it at the end of the 26th.
I admit I fell into the "under construction" trap as much as anyone, but I at least avoided the crappy graphics.
My thanks to the highschool IT guy who introduced me to doing this kind of thing, even though I didn't make a career out of it. Quickly graduated from Netscape Composer to simple handcoding of HTML. That was cool. (Was about six years ago, now.)
Even a basic overhaul of what I've got now would be quite the project, but I plan to move the same basic idea over to another free webhost
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Could someone please explain how is Geocities fundamentally different from facebook or myspace?
As far as I can tell, all of them are for creating personal websites, right? It just seems like facebook might have better built in tools for creating sites, whereas, with Geocities, you used your own html editor. So, any fundamental differences???
So, why is facebook the biggest thing around today, and Geocities is dead?
Forgive me if I just don't get this facebook thing, I spend my days writing neural simulations, and not browsing for the latest Indianapolis Colts or Pacers fan sites, or whatever fan sites people post on facebook.
Just gives an empty box, what do I type?
Frist p1ss!!!1!
pathetic, whiny, wounded geniuses misunderstood by the cold, cruel world of muggles and wogs. beseiged upon all sides by the 'common' and 'low brow'. oh, how will they ever recover from the september that never ended? pine for the good old days, when computers cost $3000 and we could keep out the riff raff. fetch me another hot toddy wiggins! and my slippers and my pipe and the times! and shut the windows its horribly drafty. and check miss whiskin's bowl, make sure she has eaten all her num nums.
and rub the boils on my feet, thats a good man servant
I intend to do what I can to keep the Geocities pages on the web. I am part of the Archive Team, an independent group of amateur archivists racing to rescue the web from destruction at its own hand. I bought geociti.es and we're in the process of putting Geocities back online.
At least, the pages we have rescued. So far, it's only about a terabyte. Imagine - fifteen years of the world's memories for less than a hundred bucks at today's storage prices.
|/usr/games/fortune
I have been using a Geocities address for more than a decade for a given rant largely because moving it would kill the ranking on the big search engines. It gets tiring hearing "how can you trust an opinion on Geocities?" as if the hosting service somehow radiated truthness or falseness waves onto the text.
Yahoo gets decent ad revenue off of Geocities. As time goes on, the disk space it requires grows cheaper and cheaper. They could stick the low-ad-producing sites on really low-end servers, or perhaps dump them in reverse order of ad-hits. They appear to be throwing the baby out with the bath-water.
Table-ized A.I.
Back when we had dialup, we used Geocities. Now that we have 1000X faster broadband, we use Twitter. Progress.
you forgot "Preview".
My Blog | Badsh
Yes, blink is an old netscape extension, and Mozilla Firefox carries a lot of Netscape background.
Yola is the new name for SynthaSite.
"Our website builder lets you easily take what's in your head and turn it into webpages in front of your eyes. Yola lets you make great-looking sites with webpages that work beautifully together. We do it without imposing banner ads or throwing up pop-up ad windows everywhere."
Squirrel!
I've been wanting to take my Geocities page down for almost a decade, but haven't been able to access it since they merged with Yahoo. (Yes I know there was some scheme to do so; tried it, didn't work.)
Just reviewed it again, and it is a blast from the past. What the heck, I'll link to the links page: My "best places of the web" in the late 90's
Appreciate that Slashdot gave me the reminder. I just wget -r 'd my site for memory sake. :) wget even managed to not get the ads. Even better!
Geocities ( and Tripod before that ) allowed me to actually create content and publish it -- without help or permissions from anyone. In the Web 2.0 world of user generated content, this may be passe ... but it was very big deal for for me and some of us who thought along those line. Geocities was where I learnt -- and practised -- how to code in HTML and actually write and deploy Java applets. The confidence of having done it -- alone and by myself -- ten years ago continues to stand me in good stead when I use the more user-friendly tools to build and deploy far more complex applications.
Thank you Geocities for opening up a new world of programming for me .. A world that I still love and cherish today ... when my job is far removed from coding.
Jai Ho
Insight into much, Influence over nothing !
>connection speeds were 1,000x or 2,000x _times_ slower than is common today
(FTFY /.)
So, common today is 10Mbit (and that's a alot), that means people only had 5-10 bps which is ridiculously low.
So, no, It's more like 10Mbit / 56Kbit = ~180 times faster
'andnothingofvaluewaslost'. dear moron. a lot of people ran various informational sites since the dawn of the internet on geocities, because getting your own cost an arm and a leg, especially if you were a student or had a low budget. one of my later clients hosted a website on mines and mining on geocities. a lot of the political dissent was expressed in geocities because 'blogging' and wordpress wasnt around then. STILL a lot of dissenters in repressed regimes were using geocities. leaving that aside, all the sites that were set up long ago was up there and you occasionally ended up in a geocities page while looking for a certain bit of information.
if you didnt know these, then you shouldnt have gone out of your way to tag it with that, because you didnt know shit about the subject. if you knew these, but still tagged it like this, the only thing you deserve a strong kick in your face.
next time, you feel the urge to tag something 'andnothingofvaluewaslost', tag yourself.
Read radical news here
Geocities and Freenetnames are the reason I do what I do today pretty much. I started hammering out all kinds of sites on Geocities as a kid for shits and giggles, Geocities gave me the hosting capability and freenetnames gave me a free domain. I had some pretty popular sites then, funny thinking back now.
- Dan
Geocities was great for its time. i had a small site on there to point to my real website i had hosted over at ACV. But with Geocities, people were able to create and manage a web page with out much knowlage of HTML. Connect and stay in contact with friends, update your status, and have music playing.. all sounds like what MySpace did.. just they revamped it for the new age. And in 5 years i would say MySpace and will be shutting down too.
Back in the day, GeoCities was more of a "free" thing than it was a "noob" thing. I had plenty of geek friends who's home pages were on GeoCities, because it was free.
to this day, I read it as 'Geo-Sites' (geo-cites) instead of Cities. That's how much I (we all) care.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Indeed. GeoCities had a lot of value, even if there was a lot on there that wasn't of value. I would have counter-tagged the article with !andnothingofvaluewaslost myself, but I can't tag it because, as usual, Slashdot's Web 2.0 interface sucks.
Does anyone know of an easy way I can download my Geocities page so I can upload it onto Tripod? I don't want to loose all my cool gifs I've got on there!
My software never has bugs.
It just develops random features.