RIP GeoCities

End of an era for early websites

Back in the mid-90s, when I first started playing with this thing called the Internet, there was a free service called GeoCities that allowed you to build your own web pages. I came to it fairly early in its existence, having a web page dealing with humanities in the Athens neighbourhood [from the Wayback Machine; links no longer work] (the site was set up with thematic neighbourhood, such as West Hollywood for gay-related sites, Silicon Valley for tech, and Area 51 for science fiction). I never fully developed my page (fairly common, I suppose, but I was in grad school and never seemed to have as much time as I needed), but it's where I deciphered HTML and CSS and the principles of web design. Once Yahoo! acquired it, my Yahoo! ID would never let me get to the site to update it. I began to get annoyed with the GeoCities sites because of the stupid sidebar the company required. Yahoo! warned people some time ago that GeoCities would go offline October 26th; they pulled the plug on Tuesday. As many have pointed out, GeoCities had become passé. But I'll miss it all the same.