Yes, I’m a day or so late on this one, but as a vet of the old “personal publishing” era of Tripod and Geocities, I felt a touch of nostalgia when I saw the Geocitiesizer, a cool web app that turns any site into a Geocities era design.
Here is my site done over for Geocities
Any Baio over at Waxy dug up an article and press kit from the failed DEN.net launch back in 1999. But the super cool thing he also dug up was the “Top 100 Sites of 1999” (Direct link to PDF of article). Just an amazing list of all the sites that were big in the first wave of the online revolution. I’m proud to say that at the time that article was published (November 1999), I was employed at Tripod, the #7 site on that top 100 list.
Another one bites the dust. Yahoo is closing down GeoCities tomorrow. GeoCities, like Tripod, was one of the first “build your own website” services on the Internet back in the day. They were such a high flying site they were sold to Yahoo for $3.65 Billion! Alas, what both of these services failed to see back then was that if they just built something like Blogger, they would have made themselves relevant for a far longer time. Instead, they had millions of sites with animated gifs, and really ugly tables. The irony of it all is that 10-15 years later, MySpace became one of the more popular sites on the Internet by doing little more than offering the same type of services as GeoCities and Tripod.
Good night, GeoCities. It was great while it lasted.
Seems that Tripod, my current free hosting service, is having some troubles with their FTP services. Once I am settled with a new job and some income, I am going to get my own URL and get a hosting service. I need to move on from the free hosting services and wing it on my own. Its time.