GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

https://cybercultural.com/p/geocities-1995/

by cheeaun • 1 year ago

166 85 1 year ago

duxup• 1 year ago

I loved GeoCities and always was sad when social media left you so few options for customizing "your page" type pages.

dylan604• 1 year ago

it's probably a knee jerk reaction to the horrendousness[0] that MySpace allowed users to do to their pages which was just a follow of some of the bonkers designs from GeoCities.

[0] so bad a new word is used for it

outer_web• 1 year ago

HOAs of the interwebs.

schlauerfox• 1 year ago

I found an old link to my GeoCities page in an old bookmarks.html, but it wasn't included in the archive.

delfinom• 1 year ago

The internet died when GeoCities died

alex1138• 1 year ago

I might quantify by saying that one really nasty thing was to block archivers from at least saving content/context

I'm pretty angry with a lot of what Yahoo did. It's very idealistic to frame it in words like this but it's almost like "Companies should be owned by people who have a strong understanding of what makes a company valuable, its users"

sgt• 1 year ago

Not true. The Internet grew up on the day that GeoCities died. It had to go out there in the corporate madness and try to get a job. A sad reality of life.

SunlitCat• 1 year ago

I still remember all those "guides" about how to design your page, so that the annoying forced ad gets not served / shown.

richarme• 1 year ago

window.top.location = window.location

geoffmunn• 1 year ago

At one point, you could leave an open <script> tag at the end of the HTML with the language attribute set to "javascript9.9" or something non-existent, and the JavaScript banner ads wouldn't load.

Good times, those were.

pkorzeniewski• 1 year ago

You can browse through archived GeoCities websites on The Geocities Gallery [0]

I get a warm feeling looking through all these "home pages", they feel so much more genuine and personal than anything found on modern social media.

[0] https://geocities.restorativland.org/

ninkendo• 1 year ago

I’m so sad that my page[0] never got archived… I started it in 1997, a few years before Yahoo bought it, and I think at some point I didn’t migrate the account or something, and it went away before anyone was really archiving anything on geocities.

- [0] geocities.com/Colosseum/Loge/3484, I’ll always remember the URL. It was a Detroit Red Wings slash Jimi Hendrix slash Smashing Pumpkins slash Star Wars fan page I made in 7th grade. I just kept putting more stuff on there.

albeebe1• 1 year ago

I'm in the same boat. I think i was geocities.com/Soho/???? right when it came out. I had Red Sox trivia questions, and it was multiple choice. The wrong answers linked to wrong.html, and the correct answer linked to 1.html, then 2.html etc. Fun times being a kid on the information super highway.

pavelstoev• 1 year ago

I hope to find my page with a listing and reviews of 3D Video Accelerator cards, now known as GPUs. I created this in 1998 while in grade 10.

pabs32• 1 year ago

More archives are listed here:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Geocities

kalleboo• 1 year ago

One thing nobody remembers (or at least never writes about in these retrospectives) from the early days of Geocities is you literally had to virtually "walk" up and down "blocks" in the the "neighborhoods" to find a "vacant lot" to put your site in. When I initially tried to sign up, they had some beta of a "vacant lot finder" cgi form that didn't work. It wasn't like these days where you just sign up and get an account - there was scarcity and a bit of a hunt.

I ended up going to some other service (it may have been Tripod?) to host my page before we switched ISPs to one that gave you 2 MB of space.

As far as I can tell the "blocks" were never archived so they're missing from the internet archive. You can see the indexes of them here https://web.archive.org/web/19961221013557/http://www.geocit...

dangrossman• 1 year ago

I remember that fondly, that was the time period when I first got online and made my own GeoCities page. I first learned HTML from a page in the Athens neighborhood, on lot 2090. 30 years and I still have that address memorized.

https://web.archive.org/web/19961022173343/http://www.geocit...

relaxing• 1 year ago

I remember desperately wanting a spot on “SunsetStrip” which was where all the music fansites were.

wayne• 1 year ago

I remember it was controversial and "the beginning of the end" when you no longer had to host at a 4-digit number and could, gasp, use a string for your URL: www.geocities.com/mywebpage instead of www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5372 . The "Acropolis" is because the main top-level "neighborhoods" quickly filled up so you had to pick a sub-neighborhood, making your URL even longer.

Another fun aspect of all this is all their neighborhoods had unpaid "community leaders". The hot neighborhoods got tons of leaders so your in was to pick an "up and coming" neighborhood and apply to be a leader there. All the neighborhoods had themes and rules which the community leaders enforced but they weren't strictly enforced. When GeoCities IPO'd, they threw all their community leaders a few pre-IPO shares and swag, which was super fun and appreciated as a high school student. :)

bdcravens• 1 year ago

So basically a precursor to Reddit

canjobear• 1 year ago

It was a nice way to organize things so you could find stuff serendipitously. I remember clicking around in my neighborhood (where I had my N64 cheat codes website) and finding some cool website with lots of slick looking 3D renders. It's rare to stumble across unplanned-for things like that nowadays.

skeeter20202• 1 year ago

> lots of slick looking 3D renders

one of the first things you had to do when putting up a page on geocities or tripod, or any other host was head over to cooltext.com and design your new logo!

chneu• 1 year ago

I miss stumbleupon quite a bit. There are similar services but the web itself just doesn't seem to function the same so the websites don't quite hit the same.

Cloudhiker kind of fills the niche but it just isn't the same.

0xDEAFBEAD• 1 year ago

It's rare to stumble across unplanned-for things like that nowadays.

The phrase "stumble across" made me think of StumbleUpon. And StumbleUpon made me think of HN.

I think we still have serendipity, but there's almost always some implicit popularity or recommendations filter. Hard to sample uniformly at random from the internet. And there doesn't seem to be a ton of demand for that, either.

Probably the best argument for readers sampling uniformly at random is actually on the supply side. It'd be better if content wasn't so optimized for popularity.

selcuka• 1 year ago

There is a partial archive at https://www.oocities.org/

pabs32• 1 year ago

More archives listed on here:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Geocities

deepsquirrelnet• 1 year ago

I remember trying to learn html when I was 12 in order to make my geocities page.

I thought it was so cool that I could add the little counter for the number of visits to the bottom. Been a while since I’ve seen one of those on a website.

486sx33• 1 year ago

I loved Geocities, the idea was unique and had depth that was visible. I chose area51 and eventually filled my page with midi files

bcoates• 1 year ago

All the good stuff was in Area51

bryanthompson• 1 year ago

Area51/Rampart here. It was a better, simpler time.

alberth• 1 year ago

https://neocities.org/

Geocities inspired site available today.

aussieguy1234• 1 year ago

Nowadays this type of static site is insanely cheap to host. Put a CDN like CloudFlare (which it seems they are using) in front of this type of site and you could scale to millions of hits basically for free.

chpatrick• 1 year ago

Or just put it on Cloudflare pages.

allset_• 1 year ago

Which is why Neocities has a free tier which doesn't even have ads.

e12e• 1 year ago

For example, we figured out how to run our own global anycast network for "cheap".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445618

With this launch, and our recently deployed 11-datacenter global anycast caching CDN, Neocities becomes a world-class web hosting service, proving you can still make building a web site fun and easy without sacrificing performance, and without being forced to figure out how to use esoteric, expensive cloud services.

https://blog.neocities.org/blog/2017/03/26/huge-space-increa...

https://status.neocities.org/

andvaribekho2• 1 year ago

I loved Sailor moon in the 90s and made My first website in notepad in 1997 about my fav Sailor scout

https://web.archive.org/web/19991001193925/http://www.geocit...

It was so exciting to find a new comment in your guestbook

nemo8551• 1 year ago

My first website was effectively a wiki on different races from Star Trek.

It was plain text.

With a few pages eventually having an image and it was just stiff said about them in the original series, next generation and eventually ds9.

It was terrible but I miss the excitement of people getting in touch with the other details and episode references I had missed out or didn’t know about.

OldOneEye• 1 year ago

I love your website!

Of course, not for the content itself, but because it's really a time capsule of the feelings and hopes of our time, back then, when we were teens, discovering this new exciting thing called Internet, the excitement of meeting like minded people and have discussions that you could never have with your friends.

I feel like nothing is ever gonna replicate that excitement anymore, but that may be more related to us being 40+ than the technology not being available xD

Geocities/Lycos/others, then switching to phpbb forums that you modded and where you had your first programming experiences to try to build games...great innocent times all around, before everything was enshittified for commercial purposes.

JuniperMesos• 1 year ago

You had terrible taste in the 90s, the best Sailor scout was obviously Ami/Amy ;)

andvaribekho2• 1 year ago

Anyone who lived the geocities era should take a look at the game "Hypnospace outlaw"

It's basically a geocities simulator where you play as a moderator

aetherson2• 1 year ago

One of my first part time jobs was as a "pornzapper" for Tripod, one of Geocities' competitors.

We had a tool called the "fleshfinder" that looked for accounts with lots of images and then lots of those images had lots of flesh tones, and would dump them into a moderation queue where we human pornzappers would glance over the images and then press a button to terminate their account or mark it as within terms of service.

geuis2• 1 year ago

This sounds like "first internet job" kind of experience. Would love to hear how you got the job and any other stories you have to share.

My first was 1999 in Florida. Dude had a shop selling jewelry on eBay. His autistic brother (not kidding, dude's brother LOVED computers and our first conversation was him telling me how to deal with himself). Very introspective but really cool guy to get to know.

The owner had a small team of Vietnamese jewelers working in the shop to make and customize jewelry. There was no scamming going on. I had to work on photography of new items and to update the eBay listings. If a customer had a problem with the jewelry they received, we would correct it for free and send it back.

The downside is that despite running a legit business, the owner was an asshole and just kept kicking out one employee after another. Including half the jewelry team.

After a few months I even quit because he just started randomly bitching and physically threatening me because the focus on a couple pieces of jewelry was slightly off. Easily a 10 minute fix.

My last day when he did this again I told him to fuck off and I was out. I still vividly remember him physically spitting from his mouth on my driver side window as I rolled it up as a pulled away.

Now that I think about it, fuck you Jeremiah. Like, 9 fucks to wherever and back. You had somehow built a really good business early on and completely fucked it up just by being yourself. It's been 26 years, but seriously fuck you. I hope your brother finally got the help he needed and you clearly were not providing.

imiric4• 1 year ago

I am a firm believer that if the web had working authoring support as originally planned in the proposal document[1] (phase 2), these early web building services wouldn't have been nearly as popular, or would have even been entirely unnecessary. The web would've grown in a distributed way with people having full control over the data they share. Centralized services might not have evolved into the commercial behemoths they are today. Social media platforms wouldn't exist as we know them, or possibly at all. ISPs would've been forced to offer symmetric connections from the start to meet the demand for home servers.

So I see this as an early mistake that snowballed into the cesspool that is the modern web. Things would've been very different, possibly for the better, if we had web publishing tools that were equally as user friendly as the web browser was in those early days.

The original WorldWideWeb browser released in 1991 did have support for WYSIWYG editing of documents, but was quickly overtaken by Mosaic, which was read-only. It would be interesting to know why this feature was abandoned and not iterated upon. The Wikipedia article[2] mentions this:

The team [at CERN] created so called "passive browsers" which do not have the ability to edit because it was hard to port this feature from the NeXT system to other operating systems.

That could be a hint, but it doesn't explain why NCSA didn't implement it in Mosaic.

WebDAV came out a few years later in 1996, but it never really took off. It was seen more as an alternative to FTP, than a native web feature. Why did it fail? Why wasn't it adopted by web browsers? Konqueror seems to have been the only one.

Much later in 2009 Opera launched Unite, a web server inside the browser, which seemed really promising at the time. But it was also quickly discontinued. At that point it might've been too little, too late.

And now we have Web3 and the decentralized movement, and even TBL is trying to undo the damage with Solid. But I have little hope any of these projects will see mainstream adoption. The modern web has too much traction, and the average web user doesn't care enough about their data to change their habits, even if the tools were simple to use.

Anyway, this is possibly too tangential for a thread on GeoCities, but I'm curious if anyone here has more information about this early history of the web. I would love to know TBL's perspective about all of this.

[1] https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb

musicale• 1 year ago

Browsers still support an editing mode:

    document.designMode = 'on'

But including a web server in every web browser never caught on, sadly enough.

II2II2• 1 year ago

Thank you for the interesting bits of history. I never knew about the planned phase 2, or the other attempts for a more distributed web.

I suspect the reasons why it never caught on were much simpler. Most of the early adopters were very enthusiastic, wanted to contribute, and there were many niches where one could contribute something new. Then there is the whole issue of design, which makes publishing on the web a relatively high effort proposition. Even with GUI editors, it is much closer to desktop publishing than word processing. The former never really caught on outside of professional work because it is high effort. Blogs and wikis are more popular, with the effort being closer to word processing. Yet even that is a bit much, given that the very low effort social media seems to be dominant these days.

Then there are things like hosting. Hosting has always been easy to find, but it is harder to find something stable across time. And discoverability, which has always been an issue but at least centralized services mitigate some of that. And the whole social angle, which instantly makes it more complex to setup and manage.

imiric4• 1 year ago

Then there is the whole issue of design, which makes publishing on the web a relatively high effort proposition.

Sure, but early web pages were quite rudimentary. A simple tool that allowed adding links and images would have been enough to start with. Later when scripting and styling were standardized, it could've evolved to support those features as well. WYSIWYG HTML editors did this relatively well, but they never solved the more difficult task of actually publishing and serving the content. The best they would do is offer file syncing over FTP, but actually setting up the web server, DNS, etc., was left to the user.

An entire industry of web builders and hosters appeared to fill this void. Services like GeoCities and Tripod were early iterations, and today we have Wix, Squarespace, Wordpress, and countless others. All social media platforms are essentially an offshoot of this, enabling non-technical users to publish content on the web. This proves that it can be done in a user friendly way, but the early web tooling simply didn't exist to empower the user to do this for themselves.

Imagine if instead of using a web browser, consuming web content consisted of a command-line tool to download files from a server, and then opening them up separately in other tools to view them. I love cURL and tools like it, but the reality is that this experiment would have never become mainstream if we didn't have a single tool that offered a cohesive and user friendly experience. This is a large reason why Mosaic was as popular as it was. It really brought the web to the masses.

Then there are things like hosting. Hosting has always been easy to find, but it is harder to find something stable across time. And discoverability, which has always been an issue but at least centralized services mitigate some of that. And the whole social angle, which instantly makes it more complex to setup and manage.

Sure, but I think those problems would've been solved over time. We see them as difficult today because we always relied on large companies to solve them for us. Instead of search indexers that crawled the web, why couldn't we rely on peer-to-peer protocols instead? DNS was an established protocol at the time that already was highly distributed. The internet itself is distributed. Why couldn't discoverability on the web work in a similar way?

The WWW proposal mentions this point:

The automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available. This is essential for news articles, but is very useful for any other material.

This sounds very similar to RSS. So there were early ideas in this direction, but they never solidified. Or if they did, it was too late to gain any traction.

Today the decentralized/federated movement is proof that this _can_ work. Imagine if we had protocols and tools like that from the very beginning. My argument is that the reason we have the highly centralized web of today is because we lacked simple web authoring early on. Non-technical users would have learned to use these tools just as they learned how to use the web browser. Our collective mindset of what the web is and how to participate in it would be built on collaborative instead of consumerist ideals. We would still need some centralized services, of course (e-commerce would still exist), but it wouldn't be for simple things such as publishing content. I even think that the grip of the advertising industry would be far weaker, since they wouldn't be able to profit as much from our personal data. Users would have far more control over their data and privacy. Propaganda and mass psychological manipulation in general wouldn't be as prevalent as they are today.

But maybe all of this is wishful thinking by a jaded mind. :)

a-dub• 1 year ago

didn't early versions of netscape have a wysiwyg html editor?

i think the bigger challenge was highly available hosting. there were authoring tools aplenty.

imiric4• 1 year ago

There were plenty of HTML _editors_, but the process of actually publishing something on the web required technical knowledge about networking and system administration. This was the domain of tech enthusiasts (and still is today), which evolved into the web hosting industry, and later enabled the proliferation of centralized web platforms like social media. My argument is that if tools existed from the very start that made publishing content as easy as web browsers made consuming it, the web would look very different today, and for the better. Clearly this was planned in the early WWW proposals, but never caught on for some reason, and I'm trying to understand why.

Timwi2• 1 year ago

No, the earliest I remember what Netscape Communicator, which included the whole suite of Navigator (browser), Composer (wysiwyg editor), Mail, and News (Usenet). That was basically the latest versions of Netscape before its downfall, not the earliest.

tombert• 1 year ago

My first foray into "programming", or at least something programming-adjacent, was getting the book "Make Your Own Web Page - A Guide for Kids!"[1] at a Scholastic Book Fair at my school. It was actually a pretty decent introduction to HTML, considering it was written for children in 1998, and it got me interested in learning a lot more about computers. "Websites" had seemed like these quasi-mythical things that I thought only really rich people or big companies could make, but when I realized that I, an actual child, could make a website, it was one of those "the world is different" moments.

When I made some awful website with stolen pictures and a lot of awful colors that didn't match (with of course a bright lime green background, obviously), I needed a place to publish my code, and that book recommended Geocities at the very end, and I did. No one ever really went to my site outside of supportive friends and relatives, but it was still a lot of fun to talk to the other kids at my school and brag about how I had my own website. Keep in mind, this would have been around ~1999-2000, I would have been about 8-9 years old. This was before everyone had a MySpace; the fact that I had a website was considered "kind of cool". I thought it was anyway.

I loved GeoCities. I miss the world when everyone had their own awful web pages. Social media made things more approachable, and is in most ways better, but I think something is lost in the centralization of everything.

[1] https://a.co/d/4AYuTSx not a referral link or anything.

aadhavans• 1 year ago

"Websites" had seemed like these quasi-mythical things that I thought only really rich people or big companies could make

That idea seems to be coming back.

harvey9• 1 year ago

I have a low traffic site on a VPS that's about 10 USD per month. A kid with motivation and an allowance could do the same.

gonzobonzo2• 1 year ago

This came up the other day and it became clear that many people, even on HN, don't realize that in the late 90's it was pretty common for non-tech people to have their own websites. There were many places where you could do this for free, and it was extremely easy to spin up a simple one. The actual content being shared - text and images - isn't really different from the majority of the content that's still being shared.

In many ways, we've actually regressed over the past 30 years, to the point where people say that the average person couldn't even create their own page before Web 2.0. And the web has become much more homogenized as a result, and most of the platforms people gravitate to, starting with Web 2.0, went for quick throw away engagement instead of more thoughtful evergreen content.

p3rls3• 1 year ago

If you think of technical and nontechnical as a spectrum, the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals.

And there was only so much to learn, too, at least as far as web development went-- not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database.

Today I think those types of nontechnical people are pursuing far more lucrative niches in product management, design, ux, marketing and stuff like that over basic webdev work.

krapp2• 1 year ago

the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals.

I don't know. There are kids making games in Roblox now, editing movies and doing all kinds of things, but Hacker News would still consider them "nontechnical" because they have social media accounts.

gonzobonzo2• 1 year ago

Those people would have been more tuned in, since it was the early days of the Web. But in terms of technical skills? Throwing up a very simple Geocities page was about as much effort as starting a blog on Blogger. Easier than fiddling around with Wordpress most of the time.

It was likely a lot easier for most people than having to figure out how to do something in DOS (which was also pretty common at the time).

skeeter20202• 1 year ago

> not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database.

Aside: the first time I put some data in a database table, and built a page to display it in the browser is one of those head exploding moments from my life.

I'm pretty sure it was MS Access, classic ASP (there were... 4? objects total to learn?) and IIS Express.

abraxas• 1 year ago

Yes, the only substantial change to the web's usability (genuinely useful apps like maps excepted) has been addition of streaming video that just did not work all that well in the nineties. Everything else has been mostly fluff. The period of so called "Web 2.0" and the subsequent proliferation of SPA and framework wars around them has felt particularly pointless. In this regard the birth of useful LLMs is a bit of a fresh air in the tech sector in that it feels like something novel has emerged that isn't just an nth way of dynamically spitting out HTML.

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

I absolutely abhor this idea that there are "tech people" and "non tech people". It's complete defeatest bullshit. When I was 12 years old setting up a website in 1997 I was not a "tech person", I was someone curious and motivated enough to learn a very simple skill (html). There's nothing special about me. We don't talk about "bread people" and "non bread people," we just talk about people who decide to learn to make bread. There are not "driving people" and "non driving people" there are those who have learned to drive and those who haven't. I'm sick of this stupid divide. You either care to learn a skill or not.

Timwi2• 1 year ago

I can't speak for others, but for me it's not a matter of dividing people in the way you describe. It's more about deciding who my audience is. If I talk to someone about my latest programming project, the conversation is completely different if it's someone who has never done programming before, versus someone who also does programming, versus someone who uses the same technologies as I do.

A website that requires the user to write HTML code targets an audience that knows HTML. That's really all there is to it. But knowledge of HTML correlates extremely strongly with knowledge of CSS and JavaScript and a couple other internet basics, so it's not labeled “people who know HTML”, it's labeled “tech people”.

p3rls3• 1 year ago

What you see as defeatist I see as recognizing reality. I consider myself nontech and I run a few webapps-- if you don't see it as a useful distinction let me connect to your live database, I dare you :)

Seanambers• 1 year ago

Most important was to have a under construction sign gif and a counter. And maybe a guestbook.

Apocryphon2• 1 year ago

Funny thing is Tripod, Angelfire, and 50megs are all still around, just no one bothers with them anymore.

washadjeffmad• 1 year ago

I was exploring Angelfire a few years ago to see who still used it and was surprised by the number of Navajo/Dine.

I learned more about bingo and reservation culture, language, and society over that few days than I had in my entire life. Vastly enhanced my understanding of Letterkenny.

Apocryphon2• 1 year ago

Hope you submit those sites to archive.org / wget locally so there are backups once the hosts are inevitably shuttered!

drooopy• 1 year ago

I made my first couple of websites on GeoCities back in 1997 for my 2 favourite tv shows at the time: Xena and The X-Files. I wish they had been archived somewhere. I remember how watching the visitor counters go up into the tens of thousands for each one of them felt like an enormous accomplishment, like I had peaked in life. Good times.

maxglute• 1 year ago

How big would the entire geocities db have been? A few gigabyes? Can't be much larger than wiki. db I guess only Google still have a relatively completel archive locked away somewhere after they removed cached viewing.

bootload• 1 year ago

GeoCities was the place you’d go to if you didn't have access to an Internet account with web hosting. I had a page there, don’t remember the location at all. Search wasn’t a priority.

At this point I was working in an Internet startup building client-side side tools.

GeoCities did one thing really well, building pages on the Web. All you needed was a browser. Innovative.

Compare this to downloading, then installing software on a Win95 box. Work on some markup, FTP the HTML, graphics, stylesheets to the server. A hint to the future you’d see in 2003 with WP. [1]

Reference

[1] Wordpress, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress

mcbain_83• 1 year ago

https://www.cameronsworld.net/ This is not the greatest site in the world - this is a tribute

Jotalea• 1 year ago

If you miss the quirky, personal touch of early web pages, NeoCities (https://neocities.org) might just bring back those memories, with a similar DIY ethos and vintage design.

GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

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