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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.
WTF! Didn't they see my gif saying my site was under construction!
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.
Has it been that long?
Can someone help me install Trumpet Winsock so I can get my Windows 3.11 system in the internet using PPP?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
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...
So Long and Thanks for all the Blink Tags!
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?
Sure can! There's a Pirated copy of the latest version on the BBS at 455-343-2121 use the username: P1rat3s and the Password of :arrrrgh! It's under the utilities section.
They only have 3 lines so try late at night or keep redialing.
While you are there try the new linux thing. You can download the first disk set of yggdrasl there. It's really cool!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I don't see any low UIDs, young grasshopper...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Based on the design, it looks like slashdot is marking the occasion too....what....it always looks like this?
I think you misunderstood the n00b comment.
I don't think they meant that people who joined the internet during or after Geocities are n00bs. It meant that Geocities was a way for n00bs to join the internet. Geocities was a point of entry for people who wanted a web page but didn't know HTML, or know what an ISP was, and couldn't pay monthly fees. It was a place where the tag found popularity, full of obnoxious backgrounds, and embedded sound effects. It was a place for n00bs.
Basically, it was like MySpace.
I'm annoyed. Geocities was a convenient place for me to dump files I needed to access from home or work. It was also more customizable than Livejournal or Facebook.
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1416685&cid=29855905
First off, I think we should disclose who we work for. I work for the a defense contractor that builds tanks. You probably work for RIAA or some other content company.
And still we wonder why secret stuff leaks :)
I'm sure fourteen years must be close to an Internet Millennium.
Just gives an empty box, what do I type?
:wq
hmm
^D
meh
^X^C
nope.. ah, "Submit"?
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
Get a haircut, hippie. And get off my lawn.
Damned kids these days with their nostalgia...
Get off my lawn.
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?
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
IIRC, I was under the CapeCanaveral directory, number 9799. I haven't even checked it in years.
I used Sizzling HTML Jalfezi and hand-coding to make my Geocities page. When they brought in the WYSIWYG editor, I was still using notepad to edit my pages. Those HTML skills have paid more than one bill and translated very handily to XML.
But that's not all. The skills I learned kludging my way through Geocities (and with Jalfrezi) still get used today. I write a handful of websites for the volunteer organizations I'm with, and more than one employer's website has been upgraded with a few of the things I learned from GC. It was a great sandbox where you could learn the basics of the web framework and HTML coding. Yeah, you couldn't host fark or /. on there, but it let you see how tables worked, what a page of animated GIFs looked like, and how to insert javascript into a website. Hey, I wore teal clothing because it was in style. Don't mock the GIF / MIDI that was the style at the time.
Finally, and this is the best part, it indirectly put me into contact with a woman I'd never met. After a little bit of contact, we went on a date. Long story short, we've been married for eleven years and have two kids.
We joke that the Internet (and I will capitalize it until they give away all my parts) created life.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I was an AOL user, you insensitive clod!
Me, too!
$comment =~ s/($verb)\s+($noun)/IN SOVIET RUSSIA, $2 $1s YOU!/g;