There must be

January 9, 2002 10:20 AM

There must be something about Geocities that attracts the most unusual people to create such enriching websites. What it is, I'm not sure.
posted by h0ney (16 comments total)

I honestly believe that geocities was one of the greatest things to happen to the web. I mean, you get tons of diviersity, some really off the wall shit, bad poetry and some very interesting people. what's not to like?
posted by corpse at 10:34 AM on January 9, 2002

Hey! My first website was on GeoCities (way back when they only had you place a small button at the bottom of each page, which wasn't too bad), and I'm sure I'm not the only person on MetaFilter who can claim that. Of course, things have changed a lot in the past five years, but GeoCities definitely ranks up there with Yahoo (before they were the same thing) in making the net accessible to a broader range of people fairly early on.
posted by Eamon at 10:42 AM on January 9, 2002

yes, I admit I had a page on geocities too "way back when" - it may still be there...hell, im too scared to look!
posted by h0ney at 10:48 AM on January 9, 2002

Like Eamon above, I had my first real site at Geocities. Actually, it's still there, but updated only often enough so they don't shut it down. Although it's easy to mock, it's a nice service for those who want to try their hand at doing a web site, but not sure if they want to spend the money on a host or not. The popup ads suck, but they're also what seperate (usually) those who are serious from those who aren't.
posted by almostcool at 10:52 AM on January 9, 2002

Geocities just gives the web the same mix of personalities that real life has, it just seems odd because the web has been such a closed community for so long. Nothing new with that, there's always an outcry when the barriers to entry get lowered. Just look at the Amateur Radio community, the arguments over removing the Morse code requirements have been raging for years, and continue even though the rules were changed.
posted by tommasz at 11:01 AM on January 9, 2002

My first site was on GeoCities also. God, I remember how long it took using the web based upload feature in Windows 3.1 and how long it took me to figure out that I needed to replace their index.html with mine.
posted by Localemperor at 11:05 AM on January 9, 2002

GeoCities is unusable as a free host because of the bandwidth restrictions. There's a very small amount of permitted traffic per hour, and if you exceed it, Yahoo turns off the site for the rest of the hour. It's brutal -- I have around a half-dozen sites I'd like to link, but they break the traffic limit within 10 minutes of being posted on my site.
posted by rcade at 11:20 AM on January 9, 2002

I had at least two sites on Geocities when I first started learning HTML. One had my resume on it, which my uncle looked at, showed to his partner, and I ended up working for them. When I became employed, I cancelled the site (I wasn't using it for anything else), and the next time my uncle went to look at it (to show a friend what his niece could do) it was a big porn site. That happened within close to a day of me cancelling it, so I found it quite funny.

Geocities was (and probably still is) a great stepping stone for independent web publishers. But as rcade says, if you start to get a significant amount of traffic, you often have to move up on the hosting ladder.
posted by melissa at 11:32 AM on January 9, 2002

When I was moderating an html forum I put little sites up on many of the free sites, so I could answer questions about to to get things done on them. Most of them are still out there somewhere.
posted by bjgeiger at 12:38 PM on January 9, 2002

i kept it real on members.aol.com (2 MB of space per screen name, ftp access if you weren't too much of a n00b to not figure it out, and no ads.). i didn't know how to work the crazy geocities setup. it gave me an empty form and told me to fill it stuff.. i was a WYSIWIG cat back then, and couldn't dig it.
posted by lotsofno at 3:23 PM on January 9, 2002

rcade - mirror them and link the mirror. works for me.
posted by quonsar at 3:36 PM on January 9, 2002

Hey! My first website was on GeoCities

Hey! My website is still on GeoCities ...
posted by feelinglistless at 4:11 PM on January 9, 2002

I have nothing against GeoCities. Sure, their banners were / are intrusive (depending on whether or not you still visit their sites), but it was a free service. I owe GeoCities some personal gratitude for giving a way to start my web designing. I have nothing but compliments for their service.

So they attract some bad sites. Oh well, I'm not being forced to read them, so it's not a problem.
posted by Dark Messiah at 6:54 PM on January 9, 2002

Joe Queenan's Contrition Page
posted by lizs at 7:24 PM on January 9, 2002

I can't see the page linked to in the original post (I guess that traffic restriction kicked in) but Joe Queenan's page is...um...odd.

It's admirable to want to apologize for past transgressions, but in such a public way? And all at once? Don't EST programs encourage people to do this?

Or maybe I'm just up too late. Anyways, GeoCities sites rock! (at least, some of them do).
posted by Badmichelle at 10:52 PM on January 9, 2002

Joe Queenan's page is hilarious.

Spano, Vincent. Too many nasty remarks to list here, but the worst was my 1993 Movieline article about Alive. This is a film about a bunch of Uruguayan rugby players who crash in the Andes and are forced to eat one another in order to survive. While seated in a theater watching the film, I hollered out to Ethan Hawke and the other victims of the crash that they should "eat Vincent Spano first," as he was by far the worst actor in the movie. Such behavior in a motion picture theater is totally unacceptable, and will not be repeated.
posted by ferris at 6:46 AM on January 10, 2002