Alas, poor geocities: I knew it well

I know, I’m several weeks late on this. Just catching up with the news that Yahoo pulled the plug on geocities last month does give me a pang. Although I never actually made myself a geocities page, having fallen in with net-purists at a very early stage of my online habit: they scoffed, and thus so did I. Still, those blinkenlight pages were an important stage in the evolution of electronic self-publishing. There’s a great timeline of what geocities offered over the years here.

Ruth Brown at Crikey had a nostalgic tribute to how geocities helped her learn to code and learn to write for readers. The animated gif tribute at the end is perfect.

I also missed Randall Munroe’s special tribute over at xkcd.com, where he changed the site’s template to look like a geocities page for the day that it shut down. Luckily Stan Schroeder at mashable took a screenshot, although the inevitable blinking stars don’t have the full effect in a static shot.

Wikipedia tells me that various orgs have stated that they would mirror geocities’ content before it shut down, and a few other orgs offered themselves as lifeboats for pages hosted on geocities that wanted to stay live. I don’t know how thorough any of these efforts have been, but the Archive Team effort looks fairly comprehensive.