- 2024
- Jun
- 25
Remember Geocities?
If you don’t, geocities was an early “personal web space” host that allowed you to create a simple page. They ranged from fan sites to personal ramblings, with some information and everything else in-between. I collected a lot of useful things off those pages, including stuff like pre-made plugins for software, links to companies of interest, and images of otherwise unobtainable things.
These sites were more often than not characterized by garish backgrounds, flashy things, more fonts than you knew existed, sound and music blaring out of your speakers, and all of the Under Construction GIFs that your machine could possibly handle without melting your video card.
I used mine as a holder for links that I could hit with my BlackBerry, among other things.
But, in 2009, Yahoo! decided they wanted to discontinue the service - 10s of thousands of web pages, full of information from the old internet, would suddenly vanish - and it would have if not for the efforts of companies like geocities.ws, among others. There were many projects to collect as much of this data as possible. Personally, I think Yahoo! really did a big F*** YOU to the internet by not handing over the archives - or at least keeping it static. It’s not like their draconian TOS didn’t give them the right to do whatever they wanted with your data.
Regardless, I found my site in the .ws archives and claimed it by having them send email to the (at the time) existing yahoo address of the same name. It’s been a few things over the years, but right now it’s a quick-link to this place, with a few preview images.
While there’s nothing on that site you haven’t seen before if you’ve been browsing the wereboar pages, it’s still there just in case. Why not, it’s a small free space to host something. If you had a geocities webpage at some point, there’s a chance it in the geocities.ws archive. If you have some way of claiming it, like the yahoo address associated with it, you may as well do so. Time to relive the old internet, party like it’s 1999, and use at much comic sans as you can!
My current geocities page
The Projects From the Bottom Drawer preview page.
(no epilepsy inducing flashing images or synth-pop that blows your speakers out, I promise - and I won’t even open your CD tray.)
I wonder if I should put a hit counter on it?
If you’d like a copy of the entire archive as retrieved by ArchiveTeam as the place was shutting down, you can find it on that site by the bay…the one where the skull and crossbones fly. Search for “Geocities” and select the one that claims it’s patched - the other one has issues and won’t complete. The files are fairly well looked after, so you shouldn’t have any issues retrieving it. It’s almost 700GB, so make sure you have room for it, and the 1TB of uncompressed data.