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Goodbye Geocities
October 24, 2009 9:08 PM   Subscribe

As Geocities is officially turned off for good tomorrow I'd like to pay my respects. I'll miss you old friend, the internet won't be the same without you.
posted by nam3d (134 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite

 
Like a thousand animated gifs screamed out and were suddenly silenced.
posted by The Whelk at 9:10 PM on October 24, 2009 [80 favorites]


I am holding out hope that they will keep the domain name alive, pointing to a single animated "under construction" gif in the center (laid out using an HTML table, of course.)
posted by davejay at 9:13 PM on October 24, 2009 [33 favorites]


First I didn't know Soupy Sales was still alive last week, and now this.I wonder who and what else still exist that I thought ended long ago.
posted by cccorlew at 9:13 PM on October 24, 2009 [5 favorites]


And yet Tripod survives!
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 9:16 PM on October 24, 2009


And so does Angelfire. Angelfire!
posted by decagon at 9:17 PM on October 24, 2009 [2 favorites]


BUT WHO WILL EAT OUR BALLS NOW??
posted by pyramid termite at 9:18 PM on October 24, 2009 [16 favorites]


Yahoo wrote on its GeoCities Help page that its decision to close the site was rooted in its desire to help its "customers explore and build relationships online in other ways."

Translation: Please sign up for our overpriced web hosting services because we're bleeding cash.
posted by dhammond at 9:20 PM on October 24, 2009 [8 favorites]


Yahoo wrote on its GeoCities Help page that its decision to close the site was rooted in its desire to help its "customers explore and build relationships online in other ways."

Their preference would be to build a monthly, recurring relationship with one of their customers' valid credit accounts.
posted by nanojath at 9:23 PM on October 24, 2009 [13 favorites]


Aw, in 1998 my high school best friend and I spent many hours at the computers in the public library building our silly anti-algebra website on Geobuilder. Which was absolutely fucking beastly to work with. And yet somehow, still so much fun!

Maybe that's why this feels a little like reading the obit of the guy I lost my virginity to...
posted by hegemone at 9:24 PM on October 24, 2009 [8 favorites]


Previously (when it was first announced).
posted by filthy light thief at 9:29 PM on October 24, 2009


Should we take bets about whether Tripod or Angelfire will go down next? I mean, you could probably make a good case that Geocities, Tripod and Angelfire were the Yahoo, Google and Microsoft of their day.

but then people would mock you
posted by davejay at 9:30 PM on October 24, 2009


Oh crap, I just had a thought: what if it turns out Geocities was the thing holding the entire internet-as-we-know-it together?
posted by davejay at 9:31 PM on October 24, 2009 [9 favorites]


.
posted by Jikido at 9:31 PM on October 24, 2009 [3 favorites]


Oh crap, I just had a thought: what if it turns out Geocities was the thing holding the entire internet-as-we-know-it together?

We got you covered. The subtle, small filling neurons of the pre-mass Electronic World Intelligence was not so easily served. Geocitities served a purpose, but the mass is large enough now to accept the loss and reabsorb the information into it's pre-natal matrix.

What you should be worried about is what makes up the basic connections of the emergent mind.

Fan-Fic. Miles of it. Enough to circle Mars and back. Twice.

When it awakes up it's going to have a seriously confused idea about human relations.
posted by The Whelk at 9:38 PM on October 24, 2009 [14 favorites]


I'll miss you, remarkably good Polvo tab site.
posted by bunnytricks at 9:41 PM on October 24, 2009


Where will I go for my "Highlander" slash fic now?
posted by brundlefly at 9:43 PM on October 24, 2009


I'll miss you, remarkably good Polvo tab site.

OMG MY EYES ARE BLEEDING SOMEBODY HELP!
posted by jock@law at 9:44 PM on October 24, 2009 [4 favorites]


Yahoo bought in 1999 for $2.9 billion

Wow… just $290 million dollars a year! What a deal!
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:46 PM on October 24, 2009


cccorlew: "First I didn't know Soupy Sales was still alive last week, and now this.I wonder who and what else still exist that I thought ended long ago."

Hugh Hefner
posted by JohnnyGunn at 9:48 PM on October 24, 2009 [1 favorite]


Hope Archive.org grabs it all.
posted by johngoren at 9:51 PM on October 24, 2009


Thanks to archive.org, Caleb's Teen Smoking Page will live forever.
posted by unmake at 9:54 PM on October 24, 2009 [12 favorites]


Thanks for posting this. My last chance to mirror all of the core texts of psychohistory.
posted by clarknova at 9:58 PM on October 24, 2009 [1 favorite]


Don't worry, it's being mirrored by two separate parties.
posted by Rhomboid at 9:59 PM on October 24, 2009 [1 favorite]


.
posted by sloe at 10:02 PM on October 24, 2009 [28 favorites]


half of geocities never loaded anyway. I say good riddance.
posted by krautland at 10:06 PM on October 24, 2009 [1 favorite]


I would quote that and reply but you can't italicize a period.
posted by clarknova at 10:10 PM on October 24, 2009


Wow. I remember (back in the pre-Myspace days) how my high school girlfriend had a Geocities page with, well, all the random stuff on it that kids put on their Myspaces now. One of its features was a page about me and how great I was, et cetera.

Until she broke up with me because she wasn't in the right headspace for a relationship, and then I didn't want to get back together. That Geocities page became a rant about how I was a horrible, horrible person who would probably end up with a house in the suburbs and a golden retriever.
I tried to find it but apparently it's gone now. Geocities was full of no end of crazy, weird stuff, a lot of it probably not easily searchable. It's a real loss in a way.
posted by dunkadunc at 10:14 PM on October 24, 2009 [3 favorites]


I know there are a lot of amazing little places on the geocities, and other early webs...

but i cannot help but create a testable hypothesis that somehow, this post on sungazing and the "incredible health and healing benefits of sungazing and this sudden demise (*i know they talked about it forever) of Geocities. Both may cause blindness, or blurry vision, headaches and other brain failures. do both cause cancer? Is this a conspiracy to get some "forbidden knowledge" that only survives "on the (NeOn)-blue" away from simple minds like ours? You decide.
;)
but, cheers to the team archeiving this piece of early web history-iana; there was some really good discussion about documenting human history at that crux point in the early webs, it was in the recent post regarding the ünder construction animated gif page.
This comment is under *heavy construction.
posted by infinite intimation at 10:16 PM on October 24, 2009


Farewell sweet purveyor of weird random information.
posted by Burhanistan at 10:31 PM on October 24, 2009


Good riddance to this blight on the web.

Though I am ashamed to admit I once had a Geocities website.
posted by Kickstart70 at 10:31 PM on October 24, 2009


Ah, Geocities. Geocities died, as far as I'm concerned, circa 1998 when they decided to not only severely limit the space you could use up (and we're talking straight HTML pages here, plus a few GIFs here and there—a megabyte, maybe?), but also how often it could be accessed. I mean: WHAT!? That's some straight up Web negative 2.0 shit right there.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:40 PM on October 24, 2009 [4 favorites]


Still: .
posted by Sys Rq at 10:42 PM on October 24, 2009


Use Site:geocities.com to find interesting gnarled nests of HTML that will be gone tommorow like 4chiang mai local guide or medical directory that looks like it hasn't been updated in a decade.

Then there's Memes, literacy and affinity spaces:
Implications for policy and digital divides in education. which apparently mentions metafilter.
posted by delmoi at 10:55 PM on October 24, 2009


Though I am ashamed to admit I once had a Geocities website.

Bite your tongue my friend and bow your head. I loved GeoCities pages because they were the outsider art of Intarwebs. Sure there was slash fiction and weird blinky gifs and, hey, that's all still out there, god help us. But there were a lot of great little hand-coded pages on math, machining, ham radio, mail art and the like; all the cool things that obsessives like to do and GeoCities let them put it out there for others and it was for free!

Pages done out of and about individual passions mixed with a desire to share.

They were enablers and sometimes it was great things they enabled. I hope someone mirrors the whole damn thing, warts and all.

.
posted by codswallop at 11:10 PM on October 24, 2009 [6 favorites]


Between GoogleCache, WayBack Machine et al, isn't much of Geocities already abandoned and backed up in a cloud anyways?
posted by Fupped Duck at 11:15 PM on October 24, 2009


Wow… just $290 million dollars a year! What a deal!

See you back here in 2016 when Myspace closes.
posted by tapeguy at 11:21 PM on October 24, 2009 [12 favorites]


Good night, sweet KAFERIAN APPLE CLUB USA (A Star Trek Fruit and Vegetable Appreciation Society).
posted by benzenedream at 11:33 PM on October 24, 2009 [4 favorites]


Prior to the emergence of Wikipedia in 2001, finding general information online was a very different game. The major sources were electronic encyclopdias such as MS Encarta or Encyclopedia Brittanica, but they had pretty limited coverage and short articles, and didn't always publish their stuff online for free, preferring instead to sell CD-ROMs. Geocities, which was already going strong when I first started poking around the web in 1995 or so, filled an important gap. It was the first and best place for a hobbyist to throw up a page about a topic they cared a great deal about and wanted to share. For years and years I would keep stumbling onto Geocities pages when doing research for school projects and I often found really wonderful detailed labors of love that made me optimistic about the future of humanity. Sure there was tons of fluff, but that's part of the story too. I hope Geocities is remembered.

Also my brother and I both made really shitty Geocities websites when we were 14 ish. Ah, memories...
posted by PercussivePaul at 11:57 PM on October 24, 2009 [7 favorites]


I started out in Soho, Geocities, ranting about advertising and adding information about campaigns, advertising book reviews and as many advertising related links I could find to a page in the bohemian Soho hoods. That way, one could find all the ad agency sites (with a review) and other advertising obsessed people ranting about ads (ad lib, where art thou?)

I coded 'by hand' and added the required animated gif's (god so ugly, animated ad gifs!), until one day when I found myself lost in my own neighborhood and space as well as script limitations was making it hard for me to do much. I hopped over to a free server in Utah instead. Then I finally sucked it up and bought 'web hosting' somewhere in 96.
posted by dabitch at 12:12 AM on October 25, 2009


Yahoo bought in 1999 for $2.9 billion

Wow… just $290 million dollars a year! What a deal!

Well that lasted longer and cost far less less than the $5.7 billion they paid for Mark Cuban's broadcast.com that same year. I can't understand why all this Yahoo money gets seemingly thrown away.
posted by bobo123 at 12:21 AM on October 25, 2009 [2 favorites]


See you back here in 2016 when Myspace closes.
ala star wars- I'm waiting in line here starting midnight 2013- I predict an early showing of That particular event.
posted by infinite intimation at 12:30 AM on October 25, 2009


Goodbye, Wilson Ogg's Geocities page (came across this page when reading about a neat house in Berkeley where he lived).
posted by zippy at 12:31 AM on October 25, 2009


Any time a part of the internet dies, a little piece of us all dies with it. Hooray for jscott and similar heroes!
posted by saturnine at 12:59 AM on October 25, 2009 [2 favorites]


What you should be worried about is what makes up the basic connections of the emergent mind.

Fan-Fic. Miles of it. Enough to circle Mars and back. Twice.

It will be a Vegan Klingon furry.
posted by y2karl at 1:01 AM on October 25, 2009


This comes as an enormous relief to me. I, too, had an ill-advised Teenage Geocities Disaster page, because 17 year old ETW thought it wise to share his (god help me) horrible, end-rhymed, whiny abuses of poetry with all of the interwebs. When the chatline I spent all my time on back then allowed us to put little messages under our usernames, I put the URL of my god-awful Geocities page in there. I actually wanted people to see it! ~*shudder*~

I abandoned the page and forgot the URL long ago, but there's always been this little anxiety in the back of my head from knowing that it was still out there some place, with a couple photos to positively identify me as the guilty party for all the trite compositions that could be found there. So while I'm glad Geocities is going away, I'd feel much better if every hard drive to have ever held anything from the SoHo/Lofts group was shredded, clubbed with magnets, melted down and launched into the sun. I might be able to relax, after that. Then I'd just have the embarrassing god-awful Diaryland page left to worry about, which is for the moment password-protected by a code I set just by mashing my keyboard when I was asked to pick a password.
posted by EatTheWeak at 1:24 AM on October 25, 2009 [10 favorites]


All I can say is: good Christ, what took so long?
posted by bwg at 1:41 AM on October 25, 2009


Thank you Geocities for getting my feet wet in building web sites (tacky gifs and all).
You will always be in my heart.
posted by spacelux at 1:42 AM on October 25, 2009


.
posted by spacelux at 1:44 AM on October 25, 2009


Yes! Good riddance! Burn it to the ground!
posted by threetoed at 1:44 AM on October 25, 2009


I've been backing up Geocities since April. It's not going away.
posted by jscott at 2:36 AM on October 25, 2009 [12 favorites]


I've been backing up Geocities since April. It's not going away.

Hey listen, there was this poetry site I was really into back in the day...
posted by maxwelton at 3:10 AM on October 25, 2009 [15 favorites]


Sure there was slash fiction and weird blinky gifs

Gosh, it must have been... I don't know, I'm hoping around ten years ago when I made my first site on geocities, but slash fiction and weird blinky gifs were literally all it contained. If I thought there was any way to find my exact one and link it back to me now? I'd be devastated, but fortunately it's lost in an amusing wave of nostalgic shame which is about to blink out of existence (copies aside), so I'm actually weirdly proud of it now.
posted by emperor.seamus at 3:13 AM on October 25, 2009


...(backups aside)
posted by emperor.seamus at 3:14 AM on October 25, 2009


Seriously, .

When I first got online Geocities was the internet.
posted by fire&wings at 4:03 AM on October 25, 2009 [4 favorites]


Isn't this the sort of post that needs more blinking text?
posted by Nanukthedog at 4:04 AM on October 25, 2009 [1 favorite]


So long, Geocities. My page had a background of rose petals and a cacophony of flashing rainbow dividers. Even though it was essentially content-less, I had an email sig file which practically begged people to visit it. Still, even at 13, I was much too classy for the blink tag.
posted by embrangled at 4:35 AM on October 25, 2009


Nanukthedog: snap!
posted by embrangled at 4:36 AM on October 25, 2009


I abandoned the page and forgot the URL long ago, but there's always been this little anxiety in the back of my head from knowing that it was still out there some place, with a couple photos to positively identify me as the guilty party for all the trite compositions that could be found there.

I found it!
posted by Servo5678 at 4:56 AM on October 25, 2009


I am going to miss it. It was where I had my first website(s), and I loved that weird way they tried to build community by getting you to endlessly browse 'neighbourhoods' to work out where your site was going to live. Signing up for Geocities was also how I found out about this amazing free webmail thing (Hotmail) which I needed to sign up, and from there on I never looked back.

Links to my Geocities sites were published in Yahoo Internet Life magazine and a bunch of other magazines. That's a kind of Internet fame that'll never happen to me again.

I never felt the same way about FortuneCity.
posted by wingless_angel at 5:22 AM on October 25, 2009


"But there were a lot of great little hand-coded pages on math, machining, ham radio, mail art and the like; all the cool things that obsessives like to do and GeoCities let them put it out there for others and it was for free! "

No kidding. Twice in the past week I found myself reading reference material on GeoCities and feeling sort of bad when I went to bookmark it and then didn't bother because it was going away in a week.
posted by Mitheral at 5:59 AM on October 25, 2009 [1 favorite]


Like a thousand animated gifs screamed out and were suddenly silenced.
posted by JaredSeth at 6:16 AM on October 25, 2009 [2 favorites]


I think that, just for this one thread, mathowie should kill the CSS file. For old times' sake.

Maybe it could be in Comic Sans, too, like that one thread way back when.

Autoplaying MIDI?
posted by danb at 6:27 AM on October 25, 2009 [2 favorites]


.
posted by sciurus at 6:34 AM on October 25, 2009


. [under construction ] .
posted by subbes at 6:47 AM on October 25, 2009


I bet that announcing the closure cost them more bandwidth than Geocities itself used in the last few years combined, between all of the archivers and the mourners saying goodbye 'one last time'.
posted by graventy at 6:57 AM on October 25, 2009


Unfortunately there was good content left there - Collective Action Notes for example. Tons of autonomist marxist and council communist texts. Whole books and articles not available anywhere else that I know of, short of private collections. I went there to grab stuff this morning when I saw this post, sadly was already all gone.....
posted by pdxjmorris at 7:00 AM on October 25, 2009


How many of those sites were under construction, never to be finished? ;_;
posted by mccarty.tim at 7:13 AM on October 25, 2009 [1 favorite]


.
One of my friends from middle school had an X-Files site on Geocities. (I was on Tripod. There was no end of bickering about the merits of either site. We're both on LJ now, heh.)
posted by sperose at 7:18 AM on October 25, 2009


I like to think that once the internet becomes a superconsciousness, it will go beyond time, a la Buddhism, and experience itself over and over again subjectively for each website. Ideally, cyberspace (as in the 1990's "jack your brain into it" cyberspace) will be populated by Greek and/or Norse gods who developed their persona from the character of each website.

We'd have Loki of 4Chan, Hermes from Gmail, Pluto from Free Republic, Mercury of eBay, and so on. When surfing cyberspace in person, you ask BlueTack for an encryption blessing before you enter the Torrent of 1000 voices. Granted, they'd all be very confused entities, mixing up pop culture, corporate brands and internet memes with their own sacred scripture.

Come to think of it, if that were the concept for an MMO or RPG that either had a staff of satirists or a super-smart AI to convert websites into NPCs, summons and enemies, I would actually play it. It'd be like the Persona series meets cyberpunk.
posted by mccarty.tim at 7:31 AM on October 25, 2009 [5 favorites]


This makes me doubly sad, because I did nothing when a regional alternative to Geocities closed down earlier this year. I should have been more like jscott and fired up the mirroring engines.
posted by ymgve at 7:52 AM on October 25, 2009


Er...

                 ________________
                |                |_____    __
                |  GOOD BYEEE!   |     |__|  |_________
                |________________|     |::|  |        /
   /\**/\       |                \.____|::|__|       <
  ( o_o  )_     |                      \::/  \._______\
   (u--u   \_)  |
    (||___   )==\
  ,dP"/b/=( /P"/b\
  |8 || 8\=== || 8
  `b,  ,P  `b,  ,P
    """`     """`

posted by mazola at 8:07 AM on October 25, 2009 [8 favorites]


Phew, it took me a while, but now my GeoCities site - Lo-fi Quote of the Day - is safe and sound on my hard drive. Future historians are rejoicing.
posted by soundofsuburbia at 8:17 AM on October 25, 2009


Seventy-three comments in and no one has called it "Geoshitties"? *tsk*
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:23 AM on October 25, 2009 [3 favorites]


Who will buy those 8,000,000,000,000 BILLION CLIP ART IMAGE EXPLOSION SPECTACULAR!!! box sets now?
posted by ardgedee at 8:45 AM on October 25, 2009


Man, I just realized that I've used that Geocities ASCII art site more frequently than I'd care to admit.
posted by killdevil at 8:54 AM on October 25, 2009


Now where will I get my ZZT fan levels?

Also, my Geocities site had the strobes from Duke Nukem 3D (animated, of course) and a background of green binary code. What'dya think of that?

I seem to remember that back in 1997 they gave us one whole megabyte of space to play with. I remember spending hours of time "coding" my site, listening to the Prodigy's Fat of the Land.

I also remember showing my 7th Grade teacher that I had a website -- a website! -- on the Internet, and she was actually impressed (this was 12 years ago, so she may not have been Actually Impressed).

It all went away when I discovered Blogger, because Blogger did everything I really had wanted it to.
posted by gc at 9:01 AM on October 25, 2009 [1 favorite]


No more Geocities.

Now where will I go to pay Tribute To Porkins?
posted by Fuzzy Monster at 9:22 AM on October 25, 2009 [4 favorites]


Is this something that you'd need a computer to know about?
posted by fixedgear at 9:25 AM on October 25, 2009 [1 favorite]


Servo - GAH! Thanks for adding a dollop of brief, unmitigated terror to my morning
posted by EatTheWeak at 9:41 AM on October 25, 2009 [1 favorite]


I've been backing up Geocities since April. It's not going away.

Actually when you put all the MIDIs, gaudy backgrounds, and animated GIFs into a common directory, I've found you can squeeze the whole website down to about 40 floppy discs.
posted by crapmatic at 10:20 AM on October 25, 2009 [4 favorites]


FYI -- I found this site which has tips on preserving Geocities with wget. The big mistake one will make is encountering the 4.2 MB per hour transfer limit those sons of bitches impose, but that link shows a decent workaround.
posted by crapmatic at 10:29 AM on October 25, 2009


GeoStupid is a memorable anti-Yahoo rant from textfiles.com:

I’m going to arrange for people to get mirrors of all the stuff we’ve downloaded and we’re going to keep putting it up and you’re going to keep seeing it up there and we’re going to tell people how stupid you are until your suit is a pile of rags in a garage and your car is holding soup in a hundred supermarkets.

I hate you.
posted by Rumple at 10:39 AM on October 25, 2009 [4 favorites]


As terrible as it was, it brings back fond memories.

.
posted by joedan at 10:54 AM on October 25, 2009


<marquee>.</marquee>
posted by Hastur at 11:03 AM on October 25, 2009 [2 favorites]


But it was still under construction!
posted by wesley at 11:06 AM on October 25, 2009 [8 favorites]


.
posted by trojanhorse at 11:51 AM on October 25, 2009


I had thought that my circa 1995-1997 website that I put up in college was long gone, but no - it's still there. I shan't link to it, as it's still under construction (ha!). Actually, it wasn't too bad, except for the pages that I left the "blue wavy water" tile as the background. Those hurt the eyes.
posted by deliquescent at 12:00 PM on October 25, 2009


Geocities jumped the shark when they dropped neighborhoods, not that those ever made much sense except from a load balancing standpoint which should have been easy to overcome but then again it was pretty much in the darm ages back then. I could understand throttling bandwidth, but the caps were so small that if the URL got more traffic than just a few friends it would cap out pretty quickly: wasn't the whole model based on ad impressions?
posted by Ogre Lawless at 12:02 PM on October 25, 2009


Simba Says Roar.
posted by will wait 4 tanjents at 12:11 PM on October 25, 2009


Geocities paved the way for thousands of morons to make pages about stuff no one gave a shit about. There were a few gems here and there but, overall, it was an odd mix of stupid hobbies, family web pages no one wanted to see and teenagers bitching about school. Top it off with a thousand animated gif's and it's perfect! Wait a minute...did I just describe 90% of the web sites that exist today? Damn you Geocities!
posted by Eclipsante at 1:32 PM on October 25, 2009


This post led me to go take another look at the site i threw together on geocities back in '96 or '97, as a sophomore in high school. Having done so, I am very much ok with the death of geocities. Please take my page down and expunge any memory of it remaining on the internet...
posted by jrb223 at 1:36 PM on October 25, 2009


I hope Geocities wasn't the secret to Pagerank.

I got a job around 1997 because the employer was so impressed with my (crappy) Geocities page and thought I was just the cutting edge person he needed for his (illfated) dot-com. Yup, the BA was meaningless, but I could use Geobuilder or whatever it was called, so I was worth $35k just on that basis. LOL
posted by acoutu at 1:46 PM on October 25, 2009


I've been wallowing in this kind of reminiscence ever since that post about the Under Construction page. That post led me to the Wayback Machine, which archived several copies of the website I had in 1999. (Sadly, not the copy with the INCREDIBLY AWESOME "buttons" I reminisced about in that thread.)

I'm startled by how different life online was, just ten years ago. For example, I found a page where I linked to an explanation of Beowulf clusters. Guess what? I linked to a Geocities page.

It's hard to remember a pre-Wikipedia time when, needing an informative link, you had to actually dig around the internet to find one. Often you'd find them on Geocities, because half of Geocities' demographic was zany teens, and the other half was obsessive hobbyists.
posted by ErikaB at 2:01 PM on October 25, 2009


Now that I found my old site, I'm getting all nostalgic. Not just for my spending the time to learn HTML and the tiniest bit of javascript (which I did not implement that well, and ended up removing), but for the person I was at that time. It's like a single diary entry that took place probably over a few months, before I became bored with it. A diary entry that you decided to paste on basement wall of a building covered in such entries; and therefore a public diary entry that nobody else would ever look at. The web was new then (it was only 2 years before that my roommate told me how a friend of ours used something called "Mosaic" and was able to look at Playboy - with pictures and everything - on his computer. I still find it amusing that the first time I heard of this "world wide web" was in order to look at porn), and I had no idea what to use it for. A static webpage about my interests at the time, some of my comic strips, oh here's a story I could slap up there - well, what else was it for. And my resume, of course, which would be very impressive to my future employers. It was a complete mis-mash, and of no interest to anybody. But it's still cool to look at it now (at least for me); I was a different person at the time and my life was going in a different direction. But, if I do say so myself, that past me was pretty funny and a little cool.

Also I remembering finding a shareware program that made animated gifs out of still pictures, and being so proud of the two animated gifs I created "by hand" - so suck it, gif haterz.
posted by deliquescent at 2:09 PM on October 25, 2009 [2 favorites]


The mexican aerophones site was the best thing I ever found on Geocities.
posted by dhruva at 2:31 PM on October 25, 2009


Speaking about Jason Scott, he has started a pledge drive, asking for $25.000:

I suddenly thought back to Kickstarter and got this crazy idea - what if I simply asked the world and fans to contribute a bit of money towards keeping me somewhat solvent, and give me the opportunity to go full-time with computer history? If I was able to get all these things done over the years, what if I just asked people to subscribe or give me some patronage and in return I fill their free time with cool stuff to look at, learn from, and enjoy?

I chose $25000 because that would remove, summarily, any living costs and basic needs I would have while I was working on my projects. The money will go to keeping me floating while I do these projects; If more than this amount comes in, I will not consider this profit, but a mandate to keep going on projects further. My rough estimate is that $25k will keep me going for at least 3-4 months, and probably longer. That's full-time, constant work on saving computer history, speaking, and presenting.
posted by ymgve at 4:18 PM on October 25, 2009


thanks ymgve, I tossed in 25 bucks.
posted by Rumple at 4:24 PM on October 25, 2009


I was a young university student when one of the candidates for student union president marched into the computer room and told us all about the existence of this 'Geocities'. Free web space -- for free! I was gobsmacked. He (and Geocities) was pretty much solely responsible for making me realise that the web wasn't simply a big electronic encyclopedia: it was all about getting stuck in.

I still didn't vote for him, mind. Not sure what the moral of this story is.
posted by sleepcrime at 4:25 PM on October 25, 2009


Yeah, my first public HTML noodlings were on Geocities, too. What, 15 years ago or something?

Tempus, it fugits.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:43 PM on October 25, 2009


So I'm the only one who was still actively maintaining a Geocities site (up until a few months ago when I learned of the impending close and moved everything to my own site)? It was free and it was easy for the lazy such as myself who have no eye or affinity for design (just give me backgrounds). I'd been maintaining my Geocities site for eight years. I never wanted a livejournal or a myspace or a blog because I had my ridiculously easy to use Geocities website on which to record whatever thoughts I felt like recording. 80+ pages of written content, and my site was never down. So it served a purpose for me, goodbye Geocities.
posted by Danila at 7:39 PM on October 25, 2009


Danila: A catering company that I worked for used Geocities as their intranet-like site from 2004-2009. I switched them over to google/sites a few months ago due to Geocities' impending death. They stuck with geocities for so long mostly because it was so easy to use, the url was easy to remember, and staff with relatively little technical savvy could easily maintain the site (mostly hosting a schedule, news updates, and some staff-handbook documents like mandatory days, and uniform requirements).

I don't get all of the Geocities hate. I remember calling it "geoshitties" when I was a teenager (I used Tripod instead), but upon reflection it was something of the birthplace of the social web. Geocities' time has passed, but it was a pretty important part of internet history.
posted by codacorolla at 7:53 PM on October 25, 2009


Would it kill Yahoo! to lift the transfer limitations for the last 24 hours of it's life?

I mean, how many people could be archiving the same Airwolf slash fic I am, before it all goes away?
posted by deliquescent at 8:43 PM on October 25, 2009 [1 favorite]


Well played, sir, well played.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:10 PM on October 25, 2009 [5 favorites]


XKCD pays tribute

[archived]
posted by jock@law at 9:11 PM on October 25, 2009 [7 favorites]


I'll just leave this here.

http://geociti.es
posted by jscott at 12:52 AM on October 26, 2009 [5 favorites]


.
posted by edmcbride at 2:34 AM on October 26, 2009


GeoCities was NEVER good. It might have been used by millions, but so was AOL.

I'm not saying that is wasn't historically significant, but let's not let our nostalgia make us forget that it was always complete shit.
posted by Chasuk at 4:05 AM on October 26, 2009


It's the content, not the medium, that made GeoCites great. It was a terrible host, but it was one of the first to be free and easy to use, so it got tons of people to make web sites that normally wouldn't have. Granted, most of them were terrible at design and had nothing to say, but for the 1% who had something meaningful or useful to reference, society will forever be thankful (because of Archive.org and the other backup projects).
posted by mccarty.tim at 5:17 AM on October 26, 2009 [1 favorite]


"I don't get all of the Geocities hate. "

It went seriously down hill after Yahoo bought them. And, like myspace, it enabled some pretty godaweful pages. However for people just wanting to throw up a few essays and manybe a picture or two it was awesome. A lot of hobbiest information is going to disappear when it is shuttered. Some of it I know won't be reproduced because the authors are dead.
posted by Mitheral at 5:38 AM on October 26, 2009


My Geocities site was a scathing rant against the Fox Glow Puck. I can't find it for the life of me, but this was a popular theme.
posted by rollbiz at 7:08 AM on October 26, 2009


> It went seriously down hill after Yahoo bought them.

To be fair, Blogger started the same year Yahoo bought Geocities, so a significant portion of the public was about to change their expectations of what they wanted out of a personal website. With blogging services, a site that existed for the purpose of throwing up a few essays and pictures, as you say, became an entry point to doing considerably more with little or no extra learning.

Geocities never caught up to these changing expectations.
posted by ardgedee at 8:00 AM on October 26, 2009


Were there any examples of good design on Geocities? I've never seen them.

I'm as guilty as anybody of crapping it up, building my first site there at the tender age of twelve. 'Twas a hideous monstrosity, but it got my feet wet with HTML and JavaScript, and as a result here I am today working as a professional web technologist (who eventually learned some design sense).

I had a good time yesterday paging through that original site I'd built, 70% of which was still online and awful as ever, good for nostalgia but I can't say the phrase "good riddance" didn't come to mind more than once. There's always a sadness when something old goes away, but I can't bring myself to feel truly heartbroken about this loss… I'd be surprised if any of the Geocities content is really worth saving, in that all valuable information in there has most likely been duplicated elsewhere with better presentation to boot.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 8:44 AM on October 26, 2009


Shit, and I've been meaning to get my page up for 12 years now.


MUST HURRY!
posted by mazola at 9:00 AM on October 26, 2009 [1 favorite]


I always had a fondness for those Here's me in my basement with my computer, making this crappy webpage sites. The intarwebs, they evolve rapidly.
posted by theora55 at 9:20 AM on October 26, 2009


goodbye old friend...
posted by nam3d at 12:36 PM on October 26, 2009


What time today does Geocities get shut down, anyway?
posted by magstheaxe at 2:36 PM on October 26, 2009


That's 4,219 instant broken links right here on MetaFilter. Here's an interesting early thread because of the comments, not the link – 'greenspunizing', link tracking and early stats (four to five thousand page views a day… 1200-1500 unique IP addresses hitting the site each day)!.
posted by tellurian at 3:19 PM on October 26, 2009


It still lives.
posted by Burhanistan at 3:22 PM on October 26, 2009


I spent the last week copying and pasting 100 pages of film reviews I did back then to a new site. It was interesting to reread the movie reviews I liked in 1999.
posted by Rashomon at 5:10 PM on October 26, 2009


Good old Angelfire.
posted by Effigy2000 at 7:05 PM on October 26, 2009 [1 favorite]


The diplomatic branch of Archive Team wrote to a Yahoo person today to ask when it'd be shut down. This was the person we'd spoken to in June.

We got back two bits of information. They're even getting rid of people who REMEMBER Geocities.
posted by jscott at 7:22 PM on October 26, 2009 [3 favorites]


Hey, it's still here!

After saving the one or two interesting Geocities pages I had in my bookmarks, I decided on a whim to do a generic Google site search of geocities.com. The results are pretty great:

Jack's "MIDI Music" Home Page - maintained to this day! (cache)

the JAZZ AGE: Flapper Culture & Style (cache)

The Anti-Tax Protestor (cache only)

Craig's Book, Movie, and Music Clubs Index of All Reviews Plus More! (cache)

Inquisitive Atheists (cache)

Primitive Designs by Bernie: Stick Furniture From Western North Carolina (cache)

Fashion Dolls Anonymous (cache)

Automatic Intelligent Ground Transportation Network (cache)

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century Fansite (cache only)

The Brett Family Home Page (cache)

The Beatles Number 9 Super Fan Site (cache)
posted by Rhaomi at 7:39 PM on October 26, 2009


There's another Geocities backup, Reocities. The maker started six days ago & kept a journal.

Some numbers: Comments on the Hacker News thread claim that Reocities has about two terabytes backed up, & jscott's & Archiveteam's Geociti.es has about one terabyte. I haven't seen any reports from the Internet Archive - on their blog or their page on archiving Geocities.
posted by Pronoiac at 8:31 PM on October 26, 2009 [1 favorite]


.
posted by NoraReed at 9:42 PM on October 26, 2009


Superchunk's Jon Wurster (as "The Batter Butler"), advertises the best Geocities URL EVER on the July 3, 2001 episode of The Best Show on WFMU
posted by melorama at 11:04 PM on October 26, 2009 [1 favorite]


Well it's the 27th, and as far as I can tell they haven't actually pulled the plug yet. Maybe it's going down in stages?
posted by jedicus at 6:57 AM on October 27, 2009


.
posted by jock@law at 1:28 PM on October 27, 2009


if you zoom in far enough on my blinking dot it looks like a bandwagon
posted by jock@law at 1:28 PM on October 27, 2009


GeoCities has closed, but there's a lot more to explore on Yahoo!

NOOOO!!!! LYING BASTARDS! There's nothing on Yahoo!
posted by Burhanistan at 2:08 PM on October 27, 2009 [1 favorite]


Yep, it's well and truly gone now. Thank goodness for the mirrors.
posted by jedicus at 2:51 PM on October 27, 2009


I wonder how long the Google Cache will retain what was there. And if there's anything there which isn't in a mirror, yet.
posted by Pronoiac at 10:30 PM on October 27, 2009


One of the old GeoCities links I clicked on had directions to Archive.org from Yahoo, the other did not (but it did have a frame that was too small, forcing you to scroll down to see the full "Geocities is Closed" message, which I thought was fitting =). Sad that they didn't do that for all pages.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:11 AM on October 28, 2009


Pronoiac: "I wonder how long the Google Cache will retain what was there. And if there's anything there which isn't in a mirror, yet."

Not long at all, apparently. Every Google cache link in my comment above is breaking now...
posted by Rhaomi at 10:27 PM on October 28, 2009


Ah. They're not serving 404s, so it would take some active work for Google to ignore the new placeholder pages.

I checked the page for Warrick, a tool that rebuilds sites from the different caches, & it seems that the various caches are usually limited to a thousand, or at maximum, ten thousand pages a day. I don't think even listing all of the now-deleted pages is doable with that difference in scale. (And I'm sure a straightforward "what pages do you have?" query would be pretty limited.)
posted by Pronoiac at 1:05 AM on October 29, 2009


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