Get our Newsletter!October 26, 2009. A sad day in Internet history: Yahoo finally took GeoCities off life support.
My “career” as a web developer started back in the late 1990s when I bought my first home computer: a Compaq Presario. Although that computer was a steaming pile of crap, I spent countless hours surfing the Web over my 28.8k dial-up connection. I remember how AOL chatrooms were all the rage and how Google could barely keep adult sites out of their search results. Images took FOREVER to download, and online video was just crazy talk. CSS was new, confusing, and was barely supported by the available browsers.
One day, I found this site called GeoCities. It was simply the coolest thing. Ever. It was probably the first popular online community outside of America Online, plus GeoCities allowed users to create their own websites. As a fifteen-year-old high school kid, my life finally had meaning. (Yes, I was definitely a nerd. Still am.)
I taught myself HTML and built my very first website: a Motley Crue fan page. It was a crude site located (appropriately) in the SunsetStrip “neighborhood”. I loaded it with full-sized images I scanned from my albums scaled to fit on the page. I had blinking and marquee text, some JavaScript alert messages, a crappy Java applet and even a “Web Ring”. To top everything off, I had a MIDI file playing “Girls Girls Girls” in the background. On a 28.8k modem, the site took like five minutes to load. . . but for 1998 it was the bomb.
What’s funny is that years later, I realized that I had successfully optimized that site for search engines – my site came up as one of the top “Motley Crue” search results on almost every search engine. Not bad for a high school kid!
Over the next few years I didn’t really do anything with the site. It sat there, collecting hits on my JavaScript hit counter, until one day GeoCities took the site down because my account was inactive. I wish I had kept the site up longer just for nostalgia, but there wasn’t much of a point. It served its purpose. . . and my taste in music moved on from hair metal.
The moral of this story is that I probably wouldn’t be where I am today without GeoCities. Furthermore, I have to believe that GeoCities significantly impacted the lives and careers of people in my generation — even the Internet as a whole. By allowing users to create their own unique content, GeoCities accelerated the Web’s growth towards the massive entity it is today. It encouraged people to learn new programming languages, and it got everyone to think about how to use the internet.
I’m going to miss you, GeoCities. RIP.
Art,
Yours is not the only story to begin like this. My first encounters with the Internet followed a very similar grain — AOL chatrooms, slow-loading images, and GeoCities Web sites. In my case, the transformation from a kid fascinated with dinosaurs to an entrepreneur building Web sites came even earlier – at age 10.
My best friend had stumbled, much as you had, onto GeoCities one day while surfing the net, and when he told me about having the ability to build our own Web sites, we were so excited we didn’t know what to do first. The immediate step was to just put something out there. Within a week we had a very crude Atlanta Braves fan site up.
The main thing I found was that GeoCities’ interface was just not quite what I wanted. A year or so after our first attempts I moved on to AngelFire, the next in the line of big “do it yourself” Web site creators. By the time I was 11 I had read an 800-page book about HTML 4, Java 1.2, and XML from front to back and struck out on the path of becoming a Web developer.
The first “job” I took was in 1997 (age 14), when I put together the first incarnation of an online gallery of my sister’s artwork. Several iterations later (and in the process of a major overhaul), it lives on at http://www.flyngypsyarts.com, and now is a PHP/MySQL database-driven application, complete with administration editors for the pieces.
As you so aptly have mentioned, GeoCities has — at least for us Web nerds — been a major driving force in the development of our lives and careers. No doubt you are correct also in asserting that the Internet’s growth and identity owe themselves partially to the influences of such amazing tools as it was.
RIP GeoCities, indeed.