Wow, so Geocities is closing. For those of you that didn't grow up with the Internet and spending every minute on it - Geocities was the bomb back in the day. Before domains and hosting became dirt cheap, it was hard to have your own web site. I remeber in 1995 a friend gave me some web space on his server and I had my own domain. It was amazing. However before I had that I really had to use whatever space I could get my hands on.
Internet Service Providers
My ISP gave me some space however it was their domain and an alias to my home directory. So my web site would look something like this http://www.erols.com/~mortalkombatrulz - Don't click the link, it's gone :(
Enter geocities
So geocities hits and gives you free space with a slightly cooler domain name. They also had interesting sub directories that would categorize your content like a neighborhood. For example http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/yourpagehere/ Silicon Valley of course indicating that it was a tech related site. This neighborhood setup was really cool. With all of these sites popping up entered a ton of annoying sites that still haunt me today.
Browser shout outs
Remember those small browser buttons that told the world 'I like Internet Explorer' or Netscape? They were everywhere. Not sure the point but I know I had them on my site.
Telling the user what resolution the site was made in
Remember 'This site is best viewed in 1024x768 resolution'? Ok so should I re-adjust my screen?
Countless others
Where should I stop? Horrible backgrounds, tables everywhere, all text aligned center? It was a different world back then. It's sad to know of the sites that I spent so much time on as a kid is now going away forever. Yahoo purchased Geocities a wile ago, things changed. Now with hosting and domains so cheap people are just getting their own domain. Yahoo also provides hosting and domains so I guess they figure close Geocities. Yahoo isn't evil, I'm sure the site wasn't doing much of anything anymore. Geocities thanks for the free hosting!
