R.I.P. GeoCities 1994-2009

[elmwood]

GeoCities, the first-ever site that gave users a whopping 15 megabytes users to create horrifically ugly home pages, is shutting down today. Fan fiction pages, Ate My Balls, and of course, glurge-filled poetry, "survivor", miscarriage memorial and dead child memorial sites like this ...

10-26-2009: Never forget.


__________________

[The Original An Gadaí]

I think it's a bit of a pity that the "homesteading" phase of the net is over. Much of the function of those early shitty looking sites is now the preserve of dedicated sites, facebook, blogs etc. that don't allow people to be nearly as garish (or individual) in their design. This all takes the fun out of it a bit.

[Feirefiz]

Some day we will tell our grandchildren about the time when we used to write whole sites by hand, each totally unique.

It will be the crystal radio set of our generation.

[Zuul]

I'd suggest everybody check out today's xkcd. Great "tribute" to those days.

The 'net truly is a whole new world than what it had been back in those days.

[OneCentStamp]

Never fear! As long as there are people out there whose design ambitions exceed their skill and taste, as long as server space is cheap or free, as long as MySpace exists, tiled-JPEGs-as-background and glurgy blinking GIFs will never truly die.

[Sarahfeena]

Aw Zuul, that was awesome.

I'm imagining all the websites lost to the ether today.

[pepperlandgirl]

I'm sad about all the fandom sites and fanfic archives that are gone forever. I know there were people scrambling to archive the real classics in my fandoms, but I'm pretty sure that not all of them were saved, and even if they were, there's no guarantee that they'll show up again. It doesn't seem like a huge loss to those outside of fandom, but a strangely important part of my life died today!

[threnody]

I saved my first ever site built on geocities a couple of days ago.

Yep. HUGE image rollovers and emo writing were the shit then.

[Zuul]

Am I the only one who misses tables?

[Taumpy]

Truly the end of an era. I had no idea this was happening, or I would have saved a copy of the one Geocities site I still look at occasionally. (a fansite for a band. they haven't updated since '01, but it was a great resource)

Am I the only one who misses tables?

Ah, tables. I remember how much fun it was to slog through the tedium of writing all the HTML for those in notepad. Good times. I was so excited when I figured out how to get rid of the border.

[tunaman]

I'm conflicted. On the one hand, I certainly won't miss most of the dredge that was GeoCities. On the other hand, I will kind of miss the egalitarian nature of the site.

I'll also miss the fan sites for certain models and actresses. Back in the late 90s I had an obsession with French model Laetitia Casta, and it seems like there used to be dozens of GeoCities fansites for her back then. I guess those kind of sites just faded away...

[OneCentStamp]

I'm conflicted. On the one hand, I certainly won't miss most of the dredge that was GeoCities. On the other hand, I will kind of miss the egalitarian nature of the site.

I'll also miss the fan sites for certain models and actresses. Back in the late 90s I had an obsession with French model Laetitia Casta, and it seems like there used to be dozens of GeoCities fansites for her back then. I guess those kind of sites just faded away...

Hehe. The shrines to celebrities were the best thing about GeoCities. I remember in about 2001, doing a search for Catherine Bell, when she was in the full flower of her JAG fame. One of the first hits was this enormous web shrine built by some lovelorn, 40-something, male fan. He had everything: a massively detailed "Who is Catherine Bell?" page; a list of her work so comprehensive that she could have used it verbatim as her CV; a pile of JAG fanfic (romantic yet tasteful); and a photo page.

The "About the author" page clarified that he did not know Ms. Bell personally and so could not pass along any messages to her, invited anyone reading to e-mail him with updates so that he could keep the page current, and also invited Catherine Bell, if she happened to be reading, to introduce herself to him.

The funniest thing about the site, though, was an addendum to the "About the author" page, where he complained that he could see, from the site traffic report, that people were only coming to his page in search of sexy pictures of Catherine in skimpy outfits, and weren't even looking at his fanfic. It was the most petulant thing I had ever seen from an adult, and as one of the very people he was complaining about, I was amused and abashed in equal measure. Well, not quite equal.

[Rube E. Tewesday]

Huh, yeah, do people still do "shrines"? They were a huge part of the Net during the days that produced GeoCities.

[OneCentStamp]

Huh, yeah, do people still do "shrines"? They were a huge part of the Net during the days that produced GeoCities.

Shrines are pretty much a thing of the past. Now that 99.9% of celebrities from the A-list to the Z-list have professionally built, official websites of their own, there's no real reason to slog through the eye-watering design, godawful spelling, and weird conceits of the fan sites. But they were a quaint and amusing phenomenon of the 90s.

It's a shame, really: if Twilight had been written ten years earlier, can you imagine the carnage it would have generated on sites like Geocities and Angelfire?

[elmwood]

Huh, yeah, do people still do "shrines"? They were a huge part of the Net during the days that produced GeoCities.

Good question. On a related note, Geocities had a lot of miscarriage and dead child memorial shrines, many of which were mocked by the bad site metasites of the day like Portal of Evil. Many such sites survive on Angelfire, like this one, but I don't know if any new memorial sites are being created.

I wonder what will be done with the geocities.com domain.

[The Original An Gadaí]

http://www.memory-of.com/
http://www.gonetoosoon.org/

There are loads of memorial sites, including tailored for pets.