6 ms·

The Geocities Gallery

110 points by kyledrake 7y ago

Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
Every time I see a GeoCities archive, I look for my old site, which I could have sworn was at TimesSquare/9994, but it's never there. Were inactive accounts purged at some point and it got flushed away before people started mirroring GeoCities? Or is it more likely that I just don't properly remember what my page URL was?
- kyledrake 7y ago
  It looks like it's there but there wasn't an index.html: https://web.archive.org/web/20010522100243/http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/9994/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010522100243/http://www.geocit... This gallery has scrubbed any sites that didn't have an index.html, but the directory listing sites should be restored in a future version.
  - Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
    Ah, that makes sense. Looks like Archive.org didn't archive any of the files, only the directory listing. Kinda worried what body.gif was. >.>
x3igh7 7y ago
Great work.
hobotron 7y ago
Really enjoying the myspace music player. Kudos.
dang 7y ago
By coincidence, I ran across this last night: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=cameronsworld.net https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=cameronsworld.net https://www.cameronsworld.net/ https://www.cameronsworld.net/
- kyledrake 7y ago
  Love that site! That was made by Cameron Askin if anyone is interested: https://www.cameronaskin.info/ https://www.cameronaskin.info/
- vicarrion 7y ago
  Only 216 requests & 3.5mb transferred!
cowboycoder_ 7y ago
This is really cool. Would love to know more about the restoration process and if there is any way to contribute to the project as a developer
- kyledrake 7y ago
  Haven't gotten to it yet, but eventually going to https://github.com/restorativland https://github.com/restorativland and will be open source. In the interim, the current mess of random code I'm using is here (a little out of date ATM): https://github.com/kyledrake/geocities-archive-toolshed https://github.com/kyledrake/geocities-archive-toolshed I've had to do a lot of starting from scratch as I find new issues and discover better ways to solve existing ones, but once I get it figured it out, it will work for other 90s sites too, and I'm hoping to release them more as general use tools than just scripts.
sp332 7y ago
https://blog.geocities.institute/ https://blog.geocities.institute/ has been doing analyses of Geocities images, page design, character encoding etc.
- kyledrake 7y ago
  Recommend following https://twitter.com/GIFmodel https://twitter.com/GIFmodel and https://twitter.com/despens https://twitter.com/despens. A lot of the code for cleaning up the archive torrent came from them (the original torrent was a really nasty mess, it took a lot of work to clean it up).
yllus 7y ago
Aw, my couch co-op (before it was really even named that) focused gaming website wasn't featured in the gallery: https://geocities.restorativland.org/TimesSquare/Arcade/2516/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/TimesSquare/Arcade/2516...
- kyledrake 7y ago
  It's there: https://geocities.restorativland.org/TimesSquare/Arcade/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/TimesSquare/Arcade/
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
superkuh 7y ago
Aw. It seems like they have samples of all of CapeCanaveral communities except "Launchpad" which was of course the coolest. It just returns a page not found.
- kyledrake 7y ago
  I might be able to get some of this restored in a future version of the archive, if it's at the internet archive.
redis_mlc 7y ago
I had some colocation in Exodus 1 next to the Geocities cage. They used thousands of SCSI Lacie consumer drives connected to Sun workstations in a cage about 10'x10'. And a large fan blowing all that heat into their neighbor's cage.
- bilegeek 7y ago
  Found some pictures of this. While the wiring is a bit of a mess, it seemed to have been fairly well managed overall. Or at least it wasn't completely cluttered. http://www.detritus.org/mike/gc/ http://www.detritus.org/mike/gc/
  - pottertheotter 7y ago
    This makes me so nostalgic! While there are so many great things about technology these days, I miss the Silicon Valley of those days. So many things were brand new and truly cutting edge.
gukov 7y ago
I miss the old internet.
- jerglingu 7y ago
  Amen. I play and watch Pokemon with my son these days, and can't help but frequently be taken back in time to the mid-late 90's when websites were raw and so many pockets of the internet didn't have a lick of even bare bones CSS. Memorials like this incapacitate me with nostalgia.
  - jaimex2 7y ago
    Ditto. Now the Internet is just a centralised clock work orange.
- Pigo 7y ago
  Sometimes I think downloading an mp3 on mIRC was to me what taking a picture with a Polaroid was like to my great grandfather (or whatever tech was first coming out). Downloading anything means very little to my son, but I still remember the joy I got from downloading Tears_in_Heaven-Eric_Clapton.mp3 in some room on Dalnet.
cybersnowflake 7y ago
We're just scratching the surface of all we've lost from the old web.
orionblastar 7y ago
There was a Geocities like web creator called Neocities https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/ I think it is still up.
- thedaemon 7y ago
  It is up. You shouldn't post a link and not be bothered to check it.
hnewsshadowbans 7y ago
Theres a ton of treasure from the old web. Hope more of this stuff comes online.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
alpb 7y ago
Anyone know why GeoCities has these "categories" and subcategories under them and not something like geocities.com/{NUMBER} ? Was it randomly assigned or chosen by users I used GeoCities extensively to host my sites, but I was only 9 or 10 years old, so it never occurred to me what these are for. Now I'm thinking if they were sharding hosting servers by URL routes.
- th0ma5 7y ago
  You could choose. I think it was experimental and a kind of vanity URL more than anything. I put mine in "College Park" because I thought I might talk about college some, which I had just started.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  When it originally launched, the "Cities" part was quite literal. To find a free "plot", you browsed a map of a town and found an empty space, and then you had 2 "neighbors" next to you. This was back when webrings[0] were still a thing and the web still had a bit more of a community feel to it. I remember when I tried to sign up they had a beta "empty plot search" so you didn't have to spend ages looking for a plot. IIRC it didn't work for me and I went to Angelfire or something. It quickly became really popular as a free web host (which was rare at the time) and they toned down the cities/communities aspect in favor of pure hosting. edit: I tried to find the neighborhood map on the internet archive but it seems hidden behind imagemaps and CGI scripts that didn't make it into the archive. This is as far as I got: https://web.archive.org/web/19970703013607/http://www15.geocities.com/Broadway/residence.html https://web.archive.org/web/19970703013607/http://www15.geoc... You can also see some of the community aspect here https://web.archive.org/web/19970703013533/http://www15.geocities.com/Broadway/leader.html https://web.archive.org/web/19970703013533/http://www15.geoc... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
- FooHentai 7y ago
  >Now I'm thinking if they were sharding hosting servers by URL routes. That was my initial thought as well, but it doesn't look like it from how a few remembrance sites describe matters: https://www.bladesplace.id.au/geocities-neighborhoods-suburbs.html https://www.bladesplace.id.au/geocities-neighborhoods-suburb...
pmlnr 7y ago
So much character on each page. Yes, they were simple, but they were all unique. I miss websites with personalities.
davedx 7y ago
Ahh my first website was a GeoCities page. They had a pretty awesome (for the time) HTML editing web app (CGI-BIN) and it was an amazing feeling. Looks like my page at Tokyo/Towers isn't in the list. Looking at some of the content I think this archive is from after one of the buyouts that happened later. So much Sailor Moon, Robotech and Dragon Ball Z... :D
jaimex2 7y ago
Oh wow. I was just a kid in high school when I made my first HTML site on geocities. It's so cool to see it has still lived on in archives. Flash content still alive and well... the javascript current year broke, probably y2k ... the geocities provided page view counter is also dead :) It's also alarming how instantly without effort I recalled my ridiculously long address on there from memory.
bkloppenborg 7y ago
A while back I found a copy of my 1998-era and early 2000s websites on an old hard disk. The data were incomplete, so I went through a pretty fun process of recovering much of the missing information from Archive.org. Then I fixed the HTML to comply with more modern standards. I wrote up a blog post about it here: https://www.kloppenborg.net/blog/2019/07/04/restoring-maxis-ville https://www.kloppenborg.net/blog/2019/07/04/restoring-maxis-.... I put the website (pure HTML) up here: https://maxis-ville.kloppenborg.net/ https://maxis-ville.kloppenborg.net/

110 points by kyledrake 7y ago

Every time I see a GeoCities archive, I look for my old site, which I could have sworn was at TimesSquare/9994, but it's never there. Were inactive accounts purged at some point and it got flushed away before people started mirroring GeoCities? Or is it more likely that I just don't properly remember what my page URL was?

kyledrake 7y ago
It looks like it's there but there wasn't an index.html: https://web.archive.org/web/20010522100243/http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/9994/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010522100243/http://www.geocit... This gallery has scrubbed any sites that didn't have an index.html, but the directory listing sites should be restored in a future version.
- Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
  Ah, that makes sense. Looks like Archive.org didn't archive any of the files, only the directory listing. Kinda worried what body.gif was. >.>

x3igh7 7y ago

Great work.

hobotron 7y ago

Really enjoying the myspace music player. Kudos.

dang 7y ago

By coincidence, I ran across this last night: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=cameronsworld.net https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=cameronsworld.net https://www.cameronsworld.net/ https://www.cameronsworld.net/

kyledrake 7y ago
Love that site! That was made by Cameron Askin if anyone is interested: https://www.cameronaskin.info/ https://www.cameronaskin.info/
vicarrion 7y ago
Only 216 requests & 3.5mb transferred!

cowboycoder_ 7y ago

This is really cool. Would love to know more about the restoration process and if there is any way to contribute to the project as a developer

kyledrake 7y ago
Haven't gotten to it yet, but eventually going to https://github.com/restorativland https://github.com/restorativland and will be open source. In the interim, the current mess of random code I'm using is here (a little out of date ATM): https://github.com/kyledrake/geocities-archive-toolshed https://github.com/kyledrake/geocities-archive-toolshed I've had to do a lot of starting from scratch as I find new issues and discover better ways to solve existing ones, but once I get it figured it out, it will work for other 90s sites too, and I'm hoping to release them more as general use tools than just scripts.

sp332 7y ago

https://blog.geocities.institute/ https://blog.geocities.institute/ has been doing analyses of Geocities images, page design, character encoding etc.

kyledrake 7y ago
Recommend following https://twitter.com/GIFmodel https://twitter.com/GIFmodel and https://twitter.com/despens https://twitter.com/despens. A lot of the code for cleaning up the archive torrent came from them (the original torrent was a really nasty mess, it took a lot of work to clean it up).

yllus 7y ago

Aw, my couch co-op (before it was really even named that) focused gaming website wasn't featured in the gallery: https://geocities.restorativland.org/TimesSquare/Arcade/2516/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/TimesSquare/Arcade/2516...

kyledrake 7y ago
It's there: https://geocities.restorativland.org/TimesSquare/Arcade/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/TimesSquare/Arcade/

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

superkuh 7y ago

Aw. It seems like they have samples of all of CapeCanaveral communities except "Launchpad" which was of course the coolest. It just returns a page not found.

kyledrake 7y ago
I might be able to get some of this restored in a future version of the archive, if it's at the internet archive.

redis_mlc 7y ago

I had some colocation in Exodus 1 next to the Geocities cage. They used thousands of SCSI Lacie consumer drives connected to Sun workstations in a cage about 10'x10'. And a large fan blowing all that heat into their neighbor's cage.

bilegeek 7y ago
Found some pictures of this. While the wiring is a bit of a mess, it seemed to have been fairly well managed overall. Or at least it wasn't completely cluttered. http://www.detritus.org/mike/gc/ http://www.detritus.org/mike/gc/
- pottertheotter 7y ago
  This makes me so nostalgic! While there are so many great things about technology these days, I miss the Silicon Valley of those days. So many things were brand new and truly cutting edge.

gukov 7y ago

I miss the old internet.

jerglingu 7y ago
Amen. I play and watch Pokemon with my son these days, and can't help but frequently be taken back in time to the mid-late 90's when websites were raw and so many pockets of the internet didn't have a lick of even bare bones CSS. Memorials like this incapacitate me with nostalgia.
- jaimex2 7y ago
  Ditto. Now the Internet is just a centralised clock work orange.
Pigo 7y ago
Sometimes I think downloading an mp3 on mIRC was to me what taking a picture with a Polaroid was like to my great grandfather (or whatever tech was first coming out). Downloading anything means very little to my son, but I still remember the joy I got from downloading Tears_in_Heaven-Eric_Clapton.mp3 in some room on Dalnet.

cybersnowflake 7y ago

We're just scratching the surface of all we've lost from the old web.

orionblastar 7y ago

There was a Geocities like web creator called Neocities https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/ I think it is still up.

thedaemon 7y ago
It is up. You shouldn't post a link and not be bothered to check it.

hnewsshadowbans 7y ago

Theres a ton of treasure from the old web. Hope more of this stuff comes online.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

alpb 7y ago

Anyone know why GeoCities has these "categories" and subcategories under them and not something like geocities.com/{NUMBER} ? Was it randomly assigned or chosen by users I used GeoCities extensively to host my sites, but I was only 9 or 10 years old, so it never occurred to me what these are for. Now I'm thinking if they were sharding hosting servers by URL routes.

th0ma5 7y ago
You could choose. I think it was experimental and a kind of vanity URL more than anything. I put mine in "College Park" because I thought I might talk about college some, which I had just started.
kalleboo 7y ago
When it originally launched, the "Cities" part was quite literal. To find a free "plot", you browsed a map of a town and found an empty space, and then you had 2 "neighbors" next to you. This was back when webrings[0] were still a thing and the web still had a bit more of a community feel to it. I remember when I tried to sign up they had a beta "empty plot search" so you didn't have to spend ages looking for a plot. IIRC it didn't work for me and I went to Angelfire or something. It quickly became really popular as a free web host (which was rare at the time) and they toned down the cities/communities aspect in favor of pure hosting. edit: I tried to find the neighborhood map on the internet archive but it seems hidden behind imagemaps and CGI scripts that didn't make it into the archive. This is as far as I got: https://web.archive.org/web/19970703013607/http://www15.geocities.com/Broadway/residence.html https://web.archive.org/web/19970703013607/http://www15.geoc... You can also see some of the community aspect here https://web.archive.org/web/19970703013533/http://www15.geocities.com/Broadway/leader.html https://web.archive.org/web/19970703013533/http://www15.geoc... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
FooHentai 7y ago
>Now I'm thinking if they were sharding hosting servers by URL routes. That was my initial thought as well, but it doesn't look like it from how a few remembrance sites describe matters: https://www.bladesplace.id.au/geocities-neighborhoods-suburbs.html https://www.bladesplace.id.au/geocities-neighborhoods-suburb...

pmlnr 7y ago

So much character on each page. Yes, they were simple, but they were all unique. I miss websites with personalities.

davedx 7y ago

Ahh my first website was a GeoCities page. They had a pretty awesome (for the time) HTML editing web app (CGI-BIN) and it was an amazing feeling. Looks like my page at Tokyo/Towers isn't in the list. Looking at some of the content I think this archive is from after one of the buyouts that happened later. So much Sailor Moon, Robotech and Dragon Ball Z... :D

jaimex2 7y ago

Oh wow. I was just a kid in high school when I made my first HTML site on geocities. It's so cool to see it has still lived on in archives. Flash content still alive and well... the javascript current year broke, probably y2k ... the geocities provided page view counter is also dead :) It's also alarming how instantly without effort I recalled my ridiculously long address on there from memory.

bkloppenborg 7y ago

A while back I found a copy of my 1998-era and early 2000s websites on an old hard disk. The data were incomplete, so I went through a pretty fun process of recovering much of the missing information from Archive.org. Then I fixed the HTML to comply with more modern standards. I wrote up a blog post about it here: https://www.kloppenborg.net/blog/2019/07/04/restoring-maxis-ville https://www.kloppenborg.net/blog/2019/07/04/restoring-maxis-.... I put the website (pure HTML) up here: https://maxis-ville.kloppenborg.net/ https://maxis-ville.kloppenborg.net/