Comments on: These pages are not under construction

These pages are not under construction

Horace Rumpole — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 06:51:03 -0800

Thanks to the Archive Team's rescue of Geocities (previously), you can now stroll down memory lane with One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op, a Tumblr of Geocities screenshots generated in Netscape 4.51.

By: Potomac Avenue

Potomac Avenue — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 06:58:50 -0800

I feel like this kid is now on metafilter. Come on fess up, who's Rory? I promise to tell you Ya Cool.

By: obscurator

obscurator — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:01:44 -0800

Yeah, that kid was up waaay past his bedtime..

By: mazola

mazola — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:02:11 -0800

It's a weird world where 'random sampling of Geocities' == 'best of the web'. And yet here we are.

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:02:30 -0800

Kilobyte Age? Never heard it. Byte Age, Megabyte Age and Gigabyte Age (current). Now moving to the Terabyte Age. Lot of ages.

By: tripping daisy

tripping daisy — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:05:33 -0800

An internet of people sharing their own ideas (even if they're a bit looney) instead of endlessly snarking on the faults of others. I remember that internet. Glad I was there to see the frontier.

By: roll truck roll

roll truck roll — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:09:13 -0800

It makes me physically angry that Yahoo hasn't just given (or redirected) the geocities.com URL to the Archive Team people.

By: Devils Rancher

Devils Rancher — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:10:49 -0800

Man, I wish these were the real thing & not just screen caps. Memories of surfing around via my AOL dialup account on my Centris 610, when you could go from site to site to site, clicking random links because no one was concerned with "retaining eyeballs" & everyone was willing to try their hand a building a page & learning a little html to make it happen... I feel old. Think I'll go outside & sing the modemsong quietly to myself.

By: frimble

frimble — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:10:57 -0800

I particularly like that there's a link to every geocities page in the screenshot post, even though the link, of course, gives a 'page not found' message. A little lure, when one might actually want to read past that first page, that acts as a reminder that all this was washed away.

By: showbiz_liz

showbiz_liz — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:11:12 -0800

Oh, I miss this. I'm not all that old but to me, this will always be how the internet is 'supposed' to be.

By: eriko

eriko — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:14:53 -0800

WHERE ARE THE FLAMING SKULLS? I've scrolled like almost three pages, and yet, no flaming skulls. Shenanigans!

By: griphus

griphus — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:15:50 -0800

Oh those warm summer nights I spent lost in Ron's Poetry Garden.

By: zengargoyle

zengargoyle — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:36:55 -0800

I wish I could remember where my Geocities page was, or that there was a good way to search for it, or that I even remembered what moniker I was going by back then.

By: rh

rh — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:49:29 -0800

Webpages don't welcome me to their homepages when I arrive anymore. They've lost all their manners.

By: griphus

griphus — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:52:18 -0800

HELLO AND WELCOME TO STEVE'S BILLY JOEL FANSITE PLEASE ENTER YOUR NAME: penis WELCOME TO STEVE'S BILLY JOEL FANSITE NaN

By: gauche

gauche — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:53:05 -0800

Man, remember when one of the constraints you had to design web pages around was dial-up download times?

By: Seymour Zamboni

Seymour Zamboni — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:53:56 -0800

Gotta love Lyndon's Homepage: "This page is dedicated to the four main things in life: #1. ME" An early on-line narcissist no doubt. I bet he has like a million Facebook friends today.

By: jeffamaphone

jeffamaphone — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:56:01 -0800

This is what most academic web pages still look like.

By: pravit

pravit — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:57:04 -0800

This is great. Also worth a look is the Please Register This Shareware tumblr. A tumblr of shareware registration screens.

By: Goofyy

Goofyy — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:58:21 -0800

I was vastly worse than the worse page in this. In the beginning, I scorned the web completely.

By: Seymour Zamboni

Seymour Zamboni — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 08:00:02 -0800

Suggestion: Listen to the top songs of 1996 from the FPP earlier today while you are scrolling these screenshots.

By: Elly Vortex

Elly Vortex — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 08:06:14 -0800

Oh man I hope they got a screenshot of my long lost perpetually-under-construction Pink Floyd Tribute page

By: byanyothername

byanyothername — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 08:18:37 -0800

Looking at this gives me an almost painful spike of nostalgia. It's not that these particular sites are especially great or anything, but I think it really is better for people to make things they're passionate about with enthusiasm than to join some marginally creepy, basically useless "service" just because everyone else they know has. Ideally, we could've found some in between where a few places on the web get an established presence but it's still "normal" to go do your own thing for the fun of it; we've kind of just allowed the corporate side to raze nearly everything else, though, and it just feels weird. Here we are, finally having the technology to do the things we dreamed about doing in the 90s, but all that stuff's passe now so let's just shrug and shuffle toward our lopsided panopticon intranet. Life is so weird.

By: showbiz_liz

showbiz_liz — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 08:22:54 -0800

Ideally, we could've found some in between where a few places on the web get an established presence but it's still "normal" to go do your own thing for the fun of it; we've kind of just allowed the corporate side to raze nearly everything else, though, and it just feels weird. So it's like the 1980s of the internet?

By: Mayor West

Mayor West — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 08:30:23 -0800

Man, remember when one of the constraints you had to design web pages around was dial-up download times? That's why you reused your assets as much as possible. Once Netscape downloaded and cached the first flaming skull gif, adding a dozen more of them in a ring around your totally bitching logo was practically free!

By: kurumi

kurumi — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 08:30:31 -0800

... memories of looking up how to do this ...

By: en forme de poire

en forme de poire — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 08:41:27 -0800

Holy crap, pravit, I totally remember a few of those! Like this one. Wow.

By: humboldt32

humboldt32 — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 09:44:16 -0800

Now where did I leave my copy of HoTMetaL.

By: gauche

gauche — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 10:01:44 -0800

That's why you reused your assets as much as possible. Once Netscape downloaded and cached the first flaming skull gif, adding a dozen more of them in a ring around your totally bitching logo was practically free! I remember an article somewhere, maybe on A List Apart, about "spriting" your design elements into one .gif and just clipping parts of it out selectively (so, for instance, you'd have a row of button graphics in "neutral" appearance and just below them another row in "hover" appearance and another row below those in "active" appearance and you'd just adjust the y coordinates on hover and click but it would only need to load one big .gif for all your buttons.) This article here, actually.

By: Devils Rancher

Devils Rancher — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 10:37:11 -0800

I made heavy use of the preload javascript that came with GoLive. Welcome to GoLive 4!

By: symbioid

symbioid — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 13:59:23 -0800

Well - if you want an archive of live pages (not screencaps), there is reocities... They tried to get as much of it as they could before they were shut down. Whether yours or someone you loved (or hated)'s page is on there, I could not say, but you surely can try it out. Just use the same url, except reocities instead of geocities. I may or may not have a page there (oh... dear).

By: Charlemagne In Sweatpants

Charlemagne In Sweatpants — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 16:03:23 -0800

Proof that there's nothing so ugly it can't inspire nostalgia.

By: ignignokt

ignignokt — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 16:06:25 -0800

Man, why'd the house/building metaphor die out? I'd like to think of myself being in MetaFilter's living room right now. I guess MetaTalk would be the bathroom.

By: Mezentian

Mezentian — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 19:03:17 -0800

So many broken image tags. So few image maps. And webrings? Gosh, I remember webrings. But this is my favourite.

By: panaceanot

panaceanot — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:36:45 -0800

I wonder if Rory (mentioned in the first comment) grew up to own this: http://www.thinkmac.co.uk