4 ms·

Ask HN: What Was Geocities.com?

5 points by thescribbblr 7y ago

Came across this website name when i was reading about sites that was acquired by Yahoo.com

72deluxe 7y ago
I remember some Geocities websites being horrendous in their appearance, making use of the "rainbow" animated horizontal ruler. TBH I miss this era of the Internet when pages loaded fast even on slow computers (although Netscape was very fussy about its HTML). The past 20+ years of "progress" have just seen more and more JavaScript and unnecessary bloat loaded for pages, with very little content on them. Giant fonts, lots of fading-in of content, lots of scrolling required. It's pretty poor!
obrajesse 7y ago
Really?
- thescribbblr 7y ago
  Didn't get exact answer to my question. As my English is not good, the articles in English didn't help me with my question.
  - obrajesse 7y ago
    What’s your native language?
    - thescribbblr 7y ago
      Hindi
davidjnelson 7y ago
Free website hosting popular in the nineties.
- thescribbblr 7y ago
  Just like wix? But why it was popular?
  - flukus 7y ago
    A bit like wix a bit like dreamweaver/frontpage and a bit like myspace rolled into one, free hosting and an applet based WYSIWIG editor. Also a bunch of components like chat, guestbooks, webrings, etc. The also had a virtual community concept, with street addresses so you had neighbors and things like that. In retrospect that was a terrible idea, but maybe the analogy helped some less technical people.
    - thescribbblr 7y ago
      So it provided some way to insert components like we see today or you can write html code as it is and the page gets created?
      - albatros2ko 7y ago
        there is a modern version of geocities, you can see what sites used to look like back in Web 1.0 https://neocities.org/browse https://neocities.org/browse geocities was the most popular way of having your own personal website back in the day, people were making websites for fun and you can see it in the sites and pages they created, overflowing with personality and quirks.
        thescribbblr 7y ago
        Woah dude! I checked NeoCities and i got hooked up, checked the featured websites. So, my general question why Yahoo closed the Geocities?
shams93 7y ago
I was on their pre-ipo team back then I was nearly fired for bringing a linux laptop to work in 1998 linux was as bad to bring to work as say a bag of weed they assumed I was trying to hack my own employer pretty funny considering how dominant linux is today but back then everyone swore by Sun Solaris.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
athiercelin 7y ago
I feel old for having the answer...
- thescribbblr 7y ago
  Seriously?
hn17 7y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/19961226152953/http://www1.geocities.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961226152953/http://www1.geoci...
- ZguideZ 7y ago
  Ha! The internet was better back then. Thanks for this...too bad it only goes a couple of links deep...
  - ZguideZ 7y ago
    I used to spend a lot of time with the kooks because conspiracy theories used to be fun instead of dangerous - https://web.archive.org/web/19961220171417/http://www.geocities.com/Area51/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961220171417/http://www.geocit...
ZguideZ 7y ago
For many of us, Geocities was an introduction to having a personal website and building community through the internet. Personally, I wish the old geocities sites were still accessible. Believe it or not - since this was before search engines (really) and wikipedia (really) many geocities sites were treasure troves of links that led to a world of information.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
leshokunin 7y ago
Geocities was a service people used to make web pages. It was one of the first places online where people got an Internet presence. People used it to make pages about themselves, their families, their pets, and their hobbies. It didn't require any coding skills, and you could make a little page and suddenly be on the Internet. Back then, search engines were very basic, so there was this common idea of needing to have your domain, your site (both words being used traditionally to describe land and property), so you'd have presence. A more recent analog Myspace, where people could have a profile, show off what they liked, these kinds of things. Fun fact: the entire Geocities archive was saved by a bunch of fans (I saw them at DWeb Camp this summer) and is below 500Gb - so it can fit on an SD card! There's also a fan effort to recreate the experience of Geocities, called Neocities. It has a bunch of fan pages that will give you an idea of what Geoticies was like.
- thescribbblr 7y ago
  Thank you so much your comment really answered my query. I am also more curious to checkout NeoCities.
thescribbblr 7y ago
How the website were created? Through direct html code injection or something else
gaspoweredcat 7y ago
and now i feel old

5 points by thescribbblr 7y ago

Came across this website name when i was reading about sites that was acquired by Yahoo.com

I remember some Geocities websites being horrendous in their appearance, making use of the "rainbow" animated horizontal ruler. TBH I miss this era of the Internet when pages loaded fast even on slow computers (although Netscape was very fussy about its HTML). The past 20+ years of "progress" have just seen more and more JavaScript and unnecessary bloat loaded for pages, with very little content on them. Giant fonts, lots of fading-in of content, lots of scrolling required. It's pretty poor!

obrajesse 7y ago

Really?

thescribbblr 7y ago
Didn't get exact answer to my question. As my English is not good, the articles in English didn't help me with my question.
- obrajesse 7y ago
  What’s your native language?
  - thescribbblr 7y ago
    Hindi

davidjnelson 7y ago

Free website hosting popular in the nineties.

thescribbblr 7y ago
Just like wix? But why it was popular?
- flukus 7y ago
  A bit like wix a bit like dreamweaver/frontpage and a bit like myspace rolled into one, free hosting and an applet based WYSIWIG editor. Also a bunch of components like chat, guestbooks, webrings, etc. The also had a virtual community concept, with street addresses so you had neighbors and things like that. In retrospect that was a terrible idea, but maybe the analogy helped some less technical people.
  - thescribbblr 7y ago
    So it provided some way to insert components like we see today or you can write html code as it is and the page gets created?
    - albatros2ko 7y ago
      there is a modern version of geocities, you can see what sites used to look like back in Web 1.0 https://neocities.org/browse https://neocities.org/browse geocities was the most popular way of having your own personal website back in the day, people were making websites for fun and you can see it in the sites and pages they created, overflowing with personality and quirks.
      - thescribbblr 7y ago
        Woah dude! I checked NeoCities and i got hooked up, checked the featured websites. So, my general question why Yahoo closed the Geocities?

shams93 7y ago

I was on their pre-ipo team back then I was nearly fired for bringing a linux laptop to work in 1998 linux was as bad to bring to work as say a bag of weed they assumed I was trying to hack my own employer pretty funny considering how dominant linux is today but back then everyone swore by Sun Solaris.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

athiercelin 7y ago

I feel old for having the answer...

thescribbblr 7y ago
Seriously?

hn17 7y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/19961226152953/http://www1.geocities.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961226152953/http://www1.geoci...

ZguideZ 7y ago
Ha! The internet was better back then. Thanks for this...too bad it only goes a couple of links deep...
- ZguideZ 7y ago
  I used to spend a lot of time with the kooks because conspiracy theories used to be fun instead of dangerous - https://web.archive.org/web/19961220171417/http://www.geocities.com/Area51/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961220171417/http://www.geocit...

ZguideZ 7y ago

For many of us, Geocities was an introduction to having a personal website and building community through the internet. Personally, I wish the old geocities sites were still accessible. Believe it or not - since this was before search engines (really) and wikipedia (really) many geocities sites were treasure troves of links that led to a world of information.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

leshokunin 7y ago

Geocities was a service people used to make web pages. It was one of the first places online where people got an Internet presence. People used it to make pages about themselves, their families, their pets, and their hobbies. It didn't require any coding skills, and you could make a little page and suddenly be on the Internet. Back then, search engines were very basic, so there was this common idea of needing to have your domain, your site (both words being used traditionally to describe land and property), so you'd have presence. A more recent analog Myspace, where people could have a profile, show off what they liked, these kinds of things. Fun fact: the entire Geocities archive was saved by a bunch of fans (I saw them at DWeb Camp this summer) and is below 500Gb - so it can fit on an SD card! There's also a fan effort to recreate the experience of Geocities, called Neocities. It has a bunch of fan pages that will give you an idea of what Geoticies was like.

thescribbblr 7y ago
Thank you so much your comment really answered my query. I am also more curious to checkout NeoCities.

thescribbblr 7y ago

How the website were created? Through direct html code injection or something else

gaspoweredcat 7y ago

and now i feel old