Geocities is finally, after nearly fifteen years, bowing its head and closing its doors. While the first reactions of many, like myself, was, “it’s about time;” others embraced the nostalgia of their first websites in the nineties – full of animated gifs, enormous counters, midi tunes, frames, tables, … the list goes on and on. With that said, we can all agree on one thing if we’re truly honest with ourselves: this closure is long overdue!
1. Homesteading
One of the first things that everyone thinks about when they hear “Geocities” is the long and memorable (albeit annoying) site paths, known as homesteading. When Geocities first started, there were a mere 6 neighborhoods, which included “Colosseum,” “Hollywood,” “RodeoDrive,” “SunsetStrip,” “WallStreet,” and “WestHollywood”. They were great, allowing newcomers of personal homepages to fantasize about the new cyber world they were about to enter. Within a year, 23 more neighborhoods popped up along with the terrible headache of explaining what neighborhood, suburb, and 4-digit number your webpage was located at. Luckily by 1999, Yahoo had taken over and switched the homestead URL scheme to the more modernly used vanity URLs. But even though the lengthy URLs have been long gone for 10 years, their association with Geocities remains remnant enough to be the first reason why the closing of Geocities is long overdue.
2. 15 Megabytes
Back in the 90′s, 15 megabytes was more than enough to store your 5 page website; not to mention the ten 640*480 JPEG pictures from your digital camera. It was even enough to host MP3s for your friends to check out before deciding to download this thing called Napster for themselves. It was a much simpler time back then, when data exchange would still often occur on 3.5″ floppy disks. But in this day and age of broadband and Hi-Def streaming, running a website off of 15 megabytes of webspace is barely enough to host a decent WordPress blog for a month. I mean, let’s face it, even emails have had larger space limits for years now. 15 megabytes just doesn’t cut it anymore.
3. SPAM
I haven’t actually experienced much Geocities spam sites personally, as Gmail filters my spam mail pretty robustly. But many users have complained about a large number of Geocities webpages hosted purely to bypass spam mail filters which block out dangerous links. These Geocities pages would redirect users to a target URL, by using cleverly encrypted javascript. (source: Spamtrackers.eu)
4. Color Choice
While nobody really got the hang of webpage design in the 90′s, Geocities site owners seemed to master the art of amateur design. One of the requirements for starting a page that I must have missed was having no sense of color coordination. For some reason the use of multicolored neon text on busy tiled background images were a popular choice. This usually turned out to be better, letting you know that the content wasn’t worth reading anyway.
5. Abandoned Webpages
I’ll admit that I was part of the cause for this reason, but Geocities became infamous for abandoned webpages in the early 00′s. People such as myself, would create accounts and build webpages just to host pictures and MP3s for friends to download (as mentioned in Reason 2: 15 Megabytes). This type of abuse led to thousands of empty webpages and parked sites that lead to much wasted google indexing and disappointing clickthroughs.
6. Under Construction
This one sort of relates to Reason 5: Abandoned Webpages. Chances were, if you didn’t stumble upon an abandoned webpage, you probably came across a webpage forever under construction. Many users new to website building only made it far enough to make a new site with the obligatory “This is my site.” text. Soon after, that website would be long forgotten while the owner moved on to LiveJournal or Xanga.
7. Splash Pages
Sometime toward the end of the century, people discovered the ease of Flash, allowing simple animations of images and text. Then *BOOM*, you suddently could no longer visit a webpage without having to sit through 15 seconds of bouncing images and scrolling text. Fortunately, this trend only stuck around for a few years.
8. Homepage Banners
Webpages of the 90′s really only had two main layouts: navigation on the top, and navigation on the left. But the one thing that both layouts would share was a big rectangular homepage banner placed at the top.
9. MIDIs
Though this is probably more of a Xanga “thing” these days, Geocities was one of the first to start the use of using MIDIs as background music for homepages. Before the popularity and accessibility of MP3s, MIDIs were the popular file format for music due to their small file sizes. However the tones of synthesized horns and keyboards got old and annoying very quickly. There’s nothing that opitomizes Web 1.0 for me than a happy birthday midi playing.
10. Animated GIFs
If there was only one reason the closing of Geocities is long overdue, it’d definitely have to be the animated GIFs most associated with the Geocities name. Love them or hate them, you can’t help but remember the once trendy craze of pixelated animations. They’d slow down your browsing to a crawl, and really test your patience. From the rotating 3D text to the dancing clipart images, Geocities was flooded beyond belief with these lagging monstrocities.
Farewell
Without further ado, we bid you farewell, Geocities. As we push your cardboard box into the sea, let’s take a look at some especially awful Geocities sites. (Be sure to leave a comment with yours, and I’ll update the posting!) – Jeffrey
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It’s the ‘official’ end to an era. Glad it is over.
Much better then my submission!
i know right! haha
pfftt
Same here
oh wow..I totally forgotten about MIDI’s! This post brought back some memories.
Wow! that was epic :D
oh memories… I think some pages can still be found in the “Way back machine”
To bad my article didn’t get selected. Anyways great article Joseph enjoyed reading. Much better than mine ;)
Thanks for the compliment, Ben.
I wish I had a little more time to revise it. My mind was shutting down by the time I tired to look for images. :-)
“xkcd has been redesigned” hahahah!
I thought XKCD’s tribute today was truly brilliant!
But I have to ask, what about all the useful information on Geocities? I know it was mostly animated gifs and under construction banners, but I’vee found myself reading manuals for old electronics on there that people have transcribed for some bizarre reason.
This is amazing, I miss the good old times.
http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:uEjYGPX8CNcJ:www.geocities.com/pokemontours/+pokemon%2Bgeocities&cd=3&hl=sv&ct=clnk&gl=se
Lol that was interesting (:
I didn’t know that XKCD was ever on geocities =O
it wasn’t
Randall just redesigned the page as a tribute to geocities
Wow. Never knew it was hated that much.
what Daniel says is so true you can find a variety of weird stuff in there! it’s going to be gone! :(
NOOO!!! I hope all my old sites don’t go down. I need to save them before they do. Still, I can’t believe it has been so long. I remember being a kid with no money and building sites with Geocities, and now I’m a full-time web developer. Funny world.
Ah .. good ol’ memories
Woah, I didn’t even realize Geocities was still around. I wish I still remembered my site since it was quite ghastly.. Aaaah, the good ol’ 90′s. Such simpler times.
If you ask me (and nobody is, but I’ll continue anyway), MySpace isn’t too different in some ways. The design of some people’s pages is absolutely ridiculous! :)
totally agree with you!!
Best viewed in IE 6.0 at 800×600 etc. :)
Indeed!
haha yeah… esp with the poor color choices and tiled backgrounds some pages are considered a bit of a clusterf*ck
Haha another reason i dont use them
Yeah, I hate myspace!
I was thinking the exact same thing! Damn, haven’t been on myspace for like 2 years now!
LOL, good riddance!
check out this: someone is trying to recover GeoCities over here: http://www.reocities.com
MySpace.com will be experiencing the same thing within a few years. One hopes. haha
Finally! I mean yea, it’s end of an era, but at least the net just got rid of some trash :). No one really need “this page doesn’t exists anymore” pages.
I built my first website there and it was totally crap lol! But that inspired me to be the webmaster. :P
Oh man.I’ve build my first web site there.
me too. hahaha
Regardless, all ten of these items were the style back then and remains a part of history. I don’t agree with this article.
Like many others, I built my first site at geocities in the late ’90s and it got me interested in web design and programming so it is bitter-sweet to see it go.
nice.. one less, some more to go ;)
Very nice, brings me back to the good ol’ days! Now hopefully Piczo.com will be the next to go!
Now we need to work on getting rid of IE 6
Here here
Just IE 6? What would web development be like without a separate style sheetfilled with unnecessary hacks?
Not sad to see them go at all. Same with yahoo, frames and tabls are their thing, they gotta go next.
Webs, live long and prosper! :D
Hooray for the end of the bane of web design! Let us now usher in a new era of even more awesomeness.
Also: under MIDI, the last sentence says “opitomizes”. Took me a minute of reading out loud trying to decide if it was supposed to be “epitomizes” or “optimizes” ;)
Ahhh… those were the days ;)
It was only about 2 years ago that I used that site to put my portfolio online. Although their page builder was slow to use it was still pretty effective as long as you didn’t use any of the cheesy effects (in that regard Geocities is no worse than Photoshop). My only issue with it was that everything loaded so slowly which made me switch over to carbonmade.
No shout outs for Angelfire? heh
now to kill Tripod and Angelfire.
Ha ha ha! :) I really enjoyed this post! Thanks for sharing these memories
xkcd’s way of commemorating this event was pretty awesome!
The source starts with:
<HTML WEB=”2.0″>
Its kinda sad to see it leave.
It was a classic
Yeah really. To Hell with all these people who are glad it’s going. GeoCities and GeoCities Help Chat (which conveniently just pointed you straight to HTMLGoodies for every question you had) were integral us all getting into web-design/development.
What a bunch of ungrateful jerks.
i know like who didnt start off with geocities. Its every persons first dream 2 have ur own page that you can show people.
I agree, if it wasn’t for geocities, I’m not sure if I would have ever gotten into this field. Was it ridiculous? Yes. Am I glad it’s gone? Not at all.
myspace beta? :P
Apparently I still have a Geocities website :-(
It’s good to reminisce, R.I.P. Geocities
Those were the days when I created my first web. Let it go…………..
We still have other free webs where we can create a better pro looking site with many more new gadgets and etc.
There’s a end for everything…………..
Losing Geocities is like what it would feel like if Wendy’s fast food restaurant closed. You went there when you were a kid but when you returned as an adult it felt old and dirty.
R.I.P. Geocities the home of the HAMSTER DANCE
yeah… geocities got me started on web design.
Now I work full time in the field, so I don’t have much hatred towards it. Just tons of nostalgia!
I wonder, what will be the next geocities?
Facebook ?
’bout bloody time
OH MAN! I think I still have a few test sites running loose in Geocities. It’s been about 10 years since I last made them as a kid. Probably got automatically deleted. Still, Geocities is one of those sites that got me really started on making websites.
Don’t worry, there’s still Angelfire to get your bad site fix!
http://www.angelfire.lycos.com/
LOL! Nostalgia. :P
this one is mine: http://geocities.com/isthioth/ (it’s in dutch)
Déjà vu
Just the word Geocities brings back memories of when websites were in their first steps, the web was a new idea, and the dot com bubble hadn’t yet burst. It’s amazing how much changes until you look back, and clearly by looking back at those examples it seems everything has changed.
What I found particularly surprising about the article is that all this happened in only ten years or so, yet back then there was no Flash (or at least not as we know it now), very little music (everything was MIDI), and obviously no video whatsoever (just the idea of downloading video seemed impossible on 56k modems!).
It makes you wonder what the next ten years will bring in the webs development. With the ever increasing speed of broadband globally, computer displays getting ever bigger and more vibrant, and interaction becoming a key feature of the web, the next ten years could see an equal rate of progression!
The closure of Geocities was a terrible idea! Sure, there was a lot of rubbish on there, but there was also a lot of useful information and a lot of memories. How many broken links have Yahoo created by removing Geocities? How many Geocities websites were created by people who have since died? It’s a piece of history, and a reflection of the state of the Internet at that time. Yahoo should at least have made a proper backup or snapshot of the site, but all they did was point archive.org in the right direction and say “get on with it”.
As Jason Scott puts it: “Help me save Geocities. Not because we love it. We hate it. But if you only save the things you love, your archive is a very poor reflection indeed.” http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1956
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2280
Those days… its quite funny how things go, you start with a graphic interface such as netscape composer, then I turned to HomeSite (today’s dreamweaver¿?) and finally ended with a simple text editor.
I do miss midi on web.
Hahaha, nice days! I’ve been started in the HTML code business with these “personal homepages”, I used to build for friends and relations. I had one but not in Geocities, it had a very loooonger name that I can’t rememeber now.
By the way, remember the and tags?
Hugs from someplace in B.A. city