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GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- duxup 2y agoI loved GeoCities and always was sad when social media left you so few options for customizing "your page" type pages.
- schlauerfox 2y agoI found an old link to my GeoCities page in an old bookmarks.html, but it wasn't included in the archive.
- delfinom 2y agoThe internet died when GeoCities died
- alex1138 2y agoI might quantify by saying that one really nasty thing was to block archivers from at least saving content/context I'm pretty angry with a lot of what Yahoo did. It's very idealistic to frame it in words like this but it's almost like "Companies should be owned by people who have a strong understanding of what makes a company valuable, its users"
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sgt 2y agoNot true. The Internet grew up on the day that GeoCities died. It had to go out there in the corporate madness and try to get a job. A sad reality of life.
- SunlitCat 2y agoI still remember all those "guides" about how to design your page, so that the annoying forced ad gets not served / shown.
- pkorzeniewski 2y agoYou can browse through archived GeoCities websites on The Geocities Gallery [0] I get a warm feeling looking through all these "home pages", they feel so much more genuine and personal than anything found on modern social media. [0] https://geocities.restorativland.org/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/
- ninkendo 2y agoI’m so sad that my page[0] never got archived… I started it in 1997, a few years before Yahoo bought it, and I think at some point I didn’t migrate the account or something, and it went away before anyone was really archiving anything on geocities. - [0] geocities.com/Colosseum/Loge/3484, I’ll always remember the URL. It was a Detroit Red Wings slash Jimi Hendrix slash Smashing Pumpkins slash Star Wars fan page I made in 7th grade. I just kept putting more stuff on there.
- albeebe1 2y agoI'm in the same boat. I think i was geocities.com/Soho/???? right when it came out. I had Red Sox trivia questions, and it was multiple choice. The wrong answers linked to wrong.html, and the correct answer linked to 1.html, then 2.html etc. Fun times being a kid on the information super highway.
- pavelstoev 2y agoI hope to find my page with a listing and reviews of 3D Video Accelerator cards, now known as GPUs. I created this in 1998 while in grade 10.
- pabs3 2y agoMore archives are listed here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Geocities https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Geocities
- kalleboo 2y agoOne thing nobody remembers (or at least never writes about in these retrospectives) from the early days of Geocities is you literally had to virtually "walk" up and down "blocks" in the the "neighborhoods" to find a "vacant lot" to put your site in. When I initially tried to sign up, they had some beta of a "vacant lot finder" cgi form that didn't work. It wasn't like these days where you just sign up and get an account - there was scarcity and a bit of a hunt. I ended up going to some other service (it may have been Tripod?) to host my page before we switched ISPs to one that gave you 2 MB of space. As far as I can tell the "blocks" were never archived so they're missing from the internet archive. You can see the indexes of them here https://web.archive.org/web/19961221013557/http://www.geocities.com/Area51/residence.html https://web.archive.org/web/19961221013557/http://www.geocit...
- relaxing 2y agoI remember desperately wanting a spot on “SunsetStrip” which was where all the music fansites were.
- dangrossman 2y agoI remember that fondly, that was the time period when I first got online and made my own GeoCities page. I first learned HTML from a page in the Athens neighborhood, on lot 2090. 30 years and I still have that address memorized. https://web.archive.org/web/19961022173343/http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2090/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961022173343/http://www.geocit...
- wayne 2y agoI remember it was controversial and "the beginning of the end" when you no longer had to host at a 4-digit number and could, gasp, use a string for your URL: www.geocities.com/mywebpage instead of www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5372 . The "Acropolis" is because the main top-level "neighborhoods" quickly filled up so you had to pick a sub-neighborhood, making your URL even longer. Another fun aspect of all this is all their neighborhoods had unpaid "community leaders". The hot neighborhoods got tons of leaders so your in was to pick an "up and coming" neighborhood and apply to be a leader there. All the neighborhoods had themes and rules which the community leaders enforced but they weren't strictly enforced. When GeoCities IPO'd, they threw all their community leaders a few pre-IPO shares and swag, which was super fun and appreciated as a high school student. :)
- deepsquirrelnet 2y agoI remember trying to learn html when I was 12 in order to make my geocities page. I thought it was so cool that I could add the little counter for the number of visits to the bottom. Been a while since I’ve seen one of those on a website.
- 486sx33 2y agoI loved Geocities, the idea was unique and had depth that was visible. I chose area51 and eventually filled my page with midi files
- bcoates 2y agoAll the good stuff was in Area51
- bryanthompson 2y agoArea51/Rampart here. It was a better, simpler time.
- alberth 2y agohttps://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/ Geocities inspired site available today.
- aussieguy1234 2y agoNowadays this type of static site is insanely cheap to host. Put a CDN like CloudFlare (which it seems they are using) in front of this type of site and you could scale to millions of hits basically for free.
- chpatrick 2y agoOr just put it on Cloudflare pages.
- allset_ 2y agoWhich is why Neocities has a free tier which doesn't even have ads.
- e12e 2y ago> For example, we figured out how to run our own global anycast network for "cheap". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445618 > With this launch, and our recently deployed 11-datacenter global anycast caching CDN, Neocities becomes a world-class web hosting service, proving you can still make building a web site fun and easy without sacrificing performance, and without being forced to figure out how to use esoteric, expensive cloud services. https://blog.neocities.org/blog/2017/03/26/huge-space-increase https://blog.neocities.org/blog/2017/03/26/huge-space-increa... https://status.neocities.org/ https://status.neocities.org/
- ydjje 2y ago[dead]
- andvaribekho 2y agoI loved Sailor moon in the 90s and made My first website in notepad in 1997 about my fav Sailor scout https://web.archive.org/web/19991001193925/http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Pagoda/4803/ https://web.archive.org/web/19991001193925/http://www.geocit... It was so exciting to find a new comment in your guestbook
- nemo8551 2y agoMy first website was effectively a wiki on different races from Star Trek. It was plain text. With a few pages eventually having an image and it was just stiff said about them in the original series, next generation and eventually ds9. It was terrible but I miss the excitement of people getting in touch with the other details and episode references I had missed out or didn’t know about.
- OldOneEye 2y agoI love your website! Of course, not for the content itself, but because it's really a time capsule of the feelings and hopes of our time, back then, when we were teens, discovering this new exciting thing called Internet, the excitement of meeting like minded people and have discussions that you could never have with your friends. I feel like nothing is ever gonna replicate that excitement anymore, but that may be more related to us being 40+ than the technology not being available xD Geocities/Lycos/others, then switching to phpbb forums that you modded and where you had your first programming experiences to try to build games...great innocent times all around, before everything was enshittified for commercial purposes.
- JuniperMesos 2y agoYou had terrible taste in the 90s, the best Sailor scout was obviously Ami/Amy ;)
- andvaribekho 2y agoAnyone who lived the geocities era should take a look at the game "Hypnospace outlaw" It's basically a geocities simulator where you play as a moderator
- aetherson 2y agoOne of my first part time jobs was as a "pornzapper" for Tripod, one of Geocities' competitors. We had a tool called the "fleshfinder" that looked for accounts with lots of images and then lots of those images had lots of flesh tones, and would dump them into a moderation queue where we human pornzappers would glance over the images and then press a button to terminate their account or mark it as within terms of service.
- geuis 2y agoThis sounds like "first internet job" kind of experience. Would love to hear how you got the job and any other stories you have to share. My first was 1999 in Florida. Dude had a shop selling jewelry on eBay. His autistic brother (not kidding, dude's brother LOVED computers and our first conversation was him telling me how to deal with himself). Very introspective but really cool guy to get to know. The owner had a small team of Vietnamese jewelers working in the shop to make and customize jewelry. There was no scamming going on. I had to work on photography of new items and to update the eBay listings. If a customer had a problem with the jewelry they received, we would correct it for free and send it back. The downside is that despite running a legit business, the owner was an asshole and just kept kicking out one employee after another. Including half the jewelry team. After a few months I even quit because he just started randomly bitching and physically threatening me because the focus on a couple pieces of jewelry was slightly off. Easily a 10 minute fix. My last day when he did this again I told him to fuck off and I was out. I still vividly remember him physically spitting from his mouth on my driver side window as I rolled it up as a pulled away. Now that I think about it, fuck you Jeremiah. Like, 9 fucks to wherever and back. You had somehow built a really good business early on and completely fucked it up just by being yourself. It's been 26 years, but seriously fuck you. I hope your brother finally got the help he needed and you clearly were not providing.
- imiric 2y agoI am a firm believer that if the web had working authoring support as originally planned in the proposal document[1] (phase 2), these early web building services wouldn't have been nearly as popular, or would have even been entirely unnecessary. The web would've grown in a distributed way with people having full control over the data they share. Centralized services might not have evolved into the commercial behemoths they are today. Social media platforms wouldn't exist as we know them, or possibly at all. ISPs would've been forced to offer symmetric connections from the start to meet the demand for home servers. So I see this as an early mistake that snowballed into the cesspool that is the modern web. Things would've been very different, possibly for the better, if we had web publishing tools that were equally as user friendly as the web browser was in those early days. The original WorldWideWeb browser released in 1991 did have support for WYSIWYG editing of documents, but was quickly overtaken by Mosaic, which was read-only. It would be interesting to know why this feature was abandoned and not iterated upon. The Wikipedia article[2] mentions this: > The team [at CERN] created so called "passive browsers" which do not have the ability to edit because it was hard to port this feature from the NeXT system to other operating systems. That could be a hint, but it doesn't explain why NCSA didn't implement it in Mosaic. WebDAV came out a few years later in 1996, but it never really took off. It was seen more as an alternative to FTP, than a native web feature. Why did it fail? Why wasn't it adopted by web browsers? Konqueror seems to have been the only one. Much later in 2009 Opera launched Unite, a web server inside the browser, which seemed really promising at the time. But it was also quickly discontinued. At that point it might've been too little, too late. And now we have Web3 and the decentralized movement, and even TBL is trying to undo the damage with Solid. But I have little hope any of these projects will see mainstream adoption. The modern web has too much traction, and the average web user doesn't care enough about their data to change their habits, even if the tools were simple to use. Anyway, this is possibly too tangential for a thread on GeoCities, but I'm curious if anyone here has more information about this early history of the web. I would love to know TBL's perspective about all of this. [1]: https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb
- musicale 2y agoBrowsers still support an editing mode: document.designMode = 'on' But including a web server in every web browser never caught on, sadly enough.
- tombert 2y agoMy first foray into "programming", or at least something programming-adjacent, was getting the book "Make Your Own Web Page - A Guide for Kids!"[1] at a Scholastic Book Fair at my school. It was actually a pretty decent introduction to HTML, considering it was written for children in 1998, and it got me interested in learning a lot more about computers. "Websites" had seemed like these quasi-mythical things that I thought only really rich people or big companies could make, but when I realized that I, an actual child, could make a website, it was one of those "the world is different" moments. When I made some awful website with stolen pictures and a lot of awful colors that didn't match (with of course a bright lime green background, obviously), I needed a place to publish my code, and that book recommended Geocities at the very end, and I did. No one ever really went to my site outside of supportive friends and relatives, but it was still a lot of fun to talk to the other kids at my school and brag about how I had my own website. Keep in mind, this would have been around ~1999-2000, I would have been about 8-9 years old. This was before everyone had a MySpace; the fact that I had a website was considered "kind of cool". I thought it was anyway. I loved GeoCities. I miss the world when everyone had their own awful web pages. Social media made things more approachable, and is in most ways better, but I think something is lost in the centralization of everything. [1] https://a.co/d/4AYuTSx https://a.co/d/4AYuTSx not a referral link or anything.
- aadhavans 2y ago> "Websites" had seemed like these quasi-mythical things that I thought only really rich people or big companies could make That idea seems to be coming back.
- gonzobonzo 2y agoThis came up the other day and it became clear that many people, even on HN, don't realize that in the late 90's it was pretty common for non-tech people to have their own websites. There were many places where you could do this for free, and it was extremely easy to spin up a simple one. The actual content being shared - text and images - isn't really different from the majority of the content that's still being shared. In many ways, we've actually regressed over the past 30 years, to the point where people say that the average person couldn't even create their own page before Web 2.0. And the web has become much more homogenized as a result, and most of the platforms people gravitate to, starting with Web 2.0, went for quick throw away engagement instead of more thoughtful evergreen content.
- p3rls 2y agoIf you think of technical and nontechnical as a spectrum, the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals. And there was only so much to learn, too, at least as far as web development went-- not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database. Today I think those types of nontechnical people are pursuing far more lucrative niches in product management, design, ux, marketing and stuff like that over basic webdev work.
- krapp 2y ago> the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals. I don't know. There are kids making games in Roblox now, editing movies and doing all kinds of things, but Hacker News would still consider them "nontechnical" because they have social media accounts.
- bolognafairy 2y agobecause they don’t use neovim
- evanjrowley 2y agoToday I explained to a sales engineer working at a Fortune 500 company how to open an Incognito window in Google Chrome. Maybe the inflection point was the transition between Windows XP and Windows Vista. In XP, the default behavior was to show file extentions in Windows file explorer. In subsequent Windown releases, file extentions for known file types were hidden by default. This led to future generations being less capable of identifying common file formats. Computer illiteracy has been snowballing ever since.
- Apocryphon 2y agoFunny thing is Tripod, Angelfire, and 50megs are all still around, just no one bothers with them anymore.
- washadjeffmad 2y agoI was exploring Angelfire a few years ago to see who still used it and was surprised by the number of Navajo/Dine. I learned more about bingo and reservation culture, language, and society over that few days than I had in my entire life. Vastly enhanced my understanding of Letterkenny.
- Apocryphon 2y agoHope you submit those sites to archive.org / wget locally so there are backups once the hosts are inevitably shuttered!
- drooopy 2y agoI made my first couple of websites on GeoCities back in 1997 for my 2 favourite tv shows at the time: Xena and The X-Files. I wish they had been archived somewhere. I remember how watching the visitor counters go up into the tens of thousands for each one of them felt like an enormous accomplishment, like I had peaked in life. Good times.
- maxglute 2y agoHow big would the entire geocities db have been? A few gigabyes? Can't be much larger than wiki. db I guess only Google still have a relatively completel archive locked away somewhere after they removed cached viewing.
- bootload 2y agoGeoCities was the place you’d go to if you didn't have access to an Internet account with web hosting. I had a page there, don’t remember the location at all. Search wasn’t a priority. At this point I was working in an Internet startup building client-side side tools. GeoCities did one thing really well, building pages on the Web. All you needed was a browser. Innovative. Compare this to downloading, then installing software on a Win95 box. Work on some markup, FTP the HTML, graphics, stylesheets to the server. A hint to the future you’d see in 2003 with WP. [1] Reference [1] Wordpress, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
- mcbain_83 2y agohttps://www.cameronsworld.net/ https://www.cameronsworld.net/ This is not the greatest site in the world - this is a tribute
- Jotalea 2y agoIf you miss the quirky, personal touch of early web pages, NeoCities (https://neocities.org https://neocities.org) might just bring back those memories, with a similar DIY ethos and vintage design.