Pith and Vinegar

I realize I haven’t updated at all lately. Until I get together some actual content, I’m just going to reminisce.

Tomorrow, GeoCities closes forever.

I put my first website on GeoCities back in about 1996. It’s so old that even the Wayback Machine’s only records are those of the guy who snapped up the address behind me.

Those were back in the wild days without usernames, but instead “neighbourhoods” and “addresses.” I was in Area51/Vault/1863.

In fact, I just found a very old Guestbook entry I made at Mimir.net, which was originally hosted at Athens/7117, which references my old website.

I later made a World of Darkness fan page there, at TimesSquare/Fortress/6967, which the Wayback actually has, surprisingly enough.

I used GeoCities for maybe two years back, more than ten years ago. While some people are weeping for the loss of their Internet adolescence, I jumped ship as soon as something else became available. In my case, in 1999-ish while GeoCities was advertising 2MB of storage (wow, 2MB!), freeservers.com began advertising 11MB. While GeoCities actually altered the HTML files, such that if you re-downloaded them you’d need to remove the extra banner code, freeservers did it dynamically.

The index.html page is in the Wayback, but all it is is a definition of frames. And the frame contents are apparently blocked due to a robots.txt exclusion. So nothing viewable there, although I think I still have it backed up on my hard drive after all this time.

2000-ish I began administrating http://www.newbremen.net for White Wolf’s New Bremen chat. 2001 I first bought wolf-spoor.org.

So I’m not terribly sad to see GeoCities go. Like many people, I was sort of surprised to find out that it’s still around. Good times while they lasted, but I moved on a long time ago.