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A Love Letter to Geocities Sites
- BigTuna 4y agoAny old heads remember using HoTMetaL to write HTML? It was literally just a glorified text editor that inserted tags for you. I eventually learned HTML well enough from it that it became faster to just write pages in Notepad.
- sparker72678 4y agoGosh, yea. There were a ton of these little editors that popped up around that time. I can't remember the name of hardly any.
- themodelplumber 4y agoDamn, and to think I almost skipped this link because I wasn't in the mood to read a letter! Catscape Navigator 2.0
- Apocryphon 4y agoSites like this belong in a museum!
- jp0d 4y agoThis needs more upvotes! How is this not at the top of HN!
- chasing 4y agoThis is amazing. I miss the days when the web truly felt like a vast tapestry of people energetically letting their freak flags fly. Pave paradise, put up... an algorithm to maximize engagement.
- duxup 4y agoAlgorithms and the dev community today might freak out themselves if someone used one too many divs, or a bit to much JavaScript… God help them if they saw the blink tag…
- _the_inflator 4y agoIt even has/had a name: DIVitis. ;)
- noorah 4y ago"DIVitis". Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
- NetOpWibby 4y agoAh, this is what React suffers from.
- tomduncalf 4y agoIt doesn’t have to as you can use fragments (<><Stuff /></>) to avoid adding a wrapper div since a few years back
- dusted 4y agoThere's never been used as much javascript in the history of time as right now, and it's never been doing as little as it does right now :P Because.. why use a perfectly good browser to render your html when you can implement another, lesser browser within the browser in javascript and have THAT render your html, but badly. Also, divs and css for layouts suck, TABLES is the way to go :)
- NovaVeles 4y agoThere are a few places lurking in the shadows of social media that the algorithms never touch, where the freak flags still fly. When you stumble across those hidden gems, it is something magical.
- dfxm12 4y agoYou think the Web still isn't full of people letting their freak flags fly? You can still see this on twitch, YT, tiktok, etc. Just like Geocities represents amateur or even naive web development/web design, there are the same types of people trying to create video content. Even Twitter (including the "weird Twitter" genre of tweets) and other social media sites are full of amateur commentators, writers, comedians, musicians, etc. Web development/web design, including the tools and techniques available to the hobbyist has just gotten much more mature. People no longer feel like a kid in the candy store in terms of adding blinking text and rotating gifs, and tutorial websites are no longer showing these examples.
- BrainVirus 4y agoTikTok to Geocities is what AstroTurf is to real grass.
- chasing 4y agoOf course there's still a lot of freaky flag-flying happening. I just meant that now it feels like everyone's shouting in the same room — a room 1/3rd full of people trying to maximize the cash value of shouting and 1/3rd full of straight-up grifters. Whereas in the late-90s millennium fever it felt more like you were laying out the crazy foundation of some optimistic future.
- rchaud 4y agoSorry, but TikTok is not modern-day Geocities, not even a bit. The operative word is "City": Geocities let you browse individual "neighborhoods" of websites at your leisure. It stayed out of the way, giving you the satisfaction of discovering little weird nooks and crannies on your own time, just as you would by traveling to a real city. Website makers also weren't trying to go viral and be invited on to the Jimmy Kimmel show. There is nothing organic about TikTok. You have to wade through a deluge of formulaic dance videos set to repetitive music clips for about an hour before the all-powerful algorithm determines that maybe you're not interested in that. For a platform that probably has billions of videos (Geocities never did), discoverability outside of the algorithm is impossible, because the search functionality sucks.
- civilized 4y agoFive notable good things that happened after 1999: 1. Obergefell 2. First Black President 3. Wikipedia 4. .....idk, maybe CRISPR? Deep Learning? Avatar: The Last Airbender? I'm drawing a blank here
- bigDinosaur 4y agoDiseases like Hep C were actually cured (a personal favourite counter to people who think medicine doesn't cure anything any more). Plenty of good things have happened, it's just you can spin any tech improvement as 'actually dooming us all' if you want to.
- tjr225 4y agoYou have to admit that the internet was more fun when it was enthusiasts expressing themselves, though. That’s the point of the post.
- bigDinosaur 4y agoYes :) perhaps people here who haven't seen it should go check out https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoI created a site there dedicated to a video game I played as a child: https://laserblast.neocities.org/ https://laserblast.neocities.org/ It was a lot of fun to build. I had to use CSS to implement a <blink> equivalent.
- Cr4shMyCar 4y agoThere's so many amazing sites people have made on Neocities. I personally didn't have the ethos and dedication to stick with it, but the fusion of creativity and technical skill makes it something else.
- Ma8ee 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoThis is a masterpiece of fine art.
- Agamus 4y agoGood medicine! I hope there are scores of us who see this and feel the immediate inspiration to recreate our old freak sites.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoIn created one a few years ago dedicated to a video game I played as a child: https://laserblast.neocities.org/ https://laserblast.neocities.org/ I had to use CSS to implement a <blink> equivalent.
- bartread 4y agoThat camera with the stack of flashbulbs tho! Used to see that sort of thing at weddings and other family events all the time in the 80s.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoYes they were fun. Especially when your older brother wakes you up in the middle of the night by flashing one on your face. I don’t remember them by the mid 80s. I remember them in the 70s and early 80s.
- bartread 4y agoYeah, that's true, they were definitely more of an early 80s thing. I certainly don't remember seeing anything like them later than primary school years.
- henrikschroder 4y agoThat ad for the game, complete with a bored teenager. Perfection. I miss the 80's.
- chrisco255 4y agoAh I long for the days when you could just use a few frames and throw an image map together for graphical navigation...
- _the_inflator 4y agoInvisible 1px GIFs for the tables...
- grishka 4y agoHN still uses those!
- albeebe1 4y agoImage maps, when Netscape would show you the pixel coordinates in the status bar. We're talking 1995?
- Retr0id 4y agoYou still can!
- pukexxr 4y agoFor free? That was what was so cool about that era of the internet. Shout out to all my angelfire ogs.
- samizdis 4y agoYes, there's Neocities [1], as beautifully demonstrated by a fellow commenter in this discussion [2]. [1] https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32315422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32315422
- samizdis 4y agoOh, the shame - but I will out myself. In the aftermath of the Barings bank collapse in 1995, and its purchase for £1 by ING, its private equity arm (Baring Private Equity Partners) - which was neither directly connected with the bank's activities, nor affected by them - wanted to ringfence itself from ING influence. It decided to commission a website and, I am still not sure how, I was asked to pitch for the job. I built a demo site, put it on a floppy and visited the BPEP offices to show the men in suits. I built the site in BBEdit Lite in three or four days. As was the fashion at the time, my brief was "We want a website" and nothing more; no purpose was imagined and, other than when I asked for locations/addresses etc, no content was provided - not even for the legal notice, although this was signed-off on by their lawyers. The site (made to be displayed 640 x 480, natch) used every sin in the canon: multiple nested frames for top menu and left-hand navigation; and, yes, it had an image map. The plan, for my part at least, was to use this as a placeholder and then move to something less embarrassing. That never happened, and I was paid to maintain my Frankenframed monster for more than a year before ING finally asserted themselves. I've just unearthed a broken fragment from the Wayback machine [1], if anyone has the stomach to look at it. For best (!) results, follow this route map: - The link should punt you to an obligatory legal warning page (and yes, this did necessitate duplicating the entire frame-based navigation - don't ask). - When it loads, click on "worldwide" in the top menu. [Edit to add: the hotspots on the image map now take a while to react when you hover over them.] - When what remains of that loads, click on the topmost orange triangle in the left-hand nav bar. That should give you an idea of how deep the rabbit hole went. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000303162503/http://www.bpep.com/ovlegalix.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20000303162503/http://www.bpep.c...
- duxup 4y agoI miss the ugly internet. It was ugly but it was also theirs, I respected that.
- sparker72678 4y agoExactly. Culture of actual personalization is just gone these days.
- Daltzn 4y agoI missed the Geocities time but my similar experience was MySpace. That my first introduction into any sort of code. I have no idea at the time what I was copying and pasting into my page. But was able to eventually learn and change things through it. Really no current platform that is used to allow this level of customization. At most it’s a banner or profile image to express yourself publicly.
- NetOpWibby 4y agoSame here, Myspace (and my dad’s Macromedia Dreamweaver book) was my entry to code. Oh how I miss it! I started working on a social network that’s basically that era of Myspace but got sidetracked by other projects. I’ll probably get back to it around the holidays.
- sodimel 4y agoIt still exists, a young developer has recreated myspace (you can edit html & css on your profile!!1!): https://spacehey.com/ https://spacehey.com/ Here's a list of cool profiles to look into (may contain dead links): https://blog.spacehey.com/entry?id=1185 https://blog.spacehey.com/entry?id=1185
- HeckFeck 4y agoIf someone would do that but for 2005-2010 Bebo, now we'd be flying.
- jszymborski 4y agoOk, this is a long shot, but if any forum is likely to know, it's HN. I first got my start in web development when I was around 8 (early 2000s) thanks to a very large (or at least it was to an 8 year old) purple book on HTML. There was one passing mention of how animated GIFs might be added to websites with an IMG tag. The example of the animated GIF they showed (they exploded the frames) reminded me of this image [0] on this wonderful site (although perhaps the seal was bouncing a ball rather than spinning the globe). Anywho, if anyone can remember a large, big purple book on HTML from the early naughts, you'd make my day if you could send it my way. [1] https://www.cameronsworld.net/img/content/10/7.gif https://www.cameronsworld.net/img/content/10/7.gif
- robjan 4y agoI think it was called "Mastering HTML4.0" or "HTML4.0 No Experience Required" if that narrows down your search. I also remember checking this book out from a library in my teens.
- izakage 4y agoAnother one with similar graphics might have been “HTML Goodies”
- taejavu 4y agoI got you fam: https://www.amazon.com/Yourself-Publishing-Professional-Reference-Second/dp/0672318385 https://www.amazon.com/Yourself-Publishing-Professional-Refe...
- scottbr3 4y agoSo much nostalgia in those gifs. I built my first website on Geocities in 1997. It was devoted to all the PC games my middle school self loved to play. I have fond memories of "visiting my neighbors" by checking out the addresses next to mine. e.g. geocities.com/TimesSquare/1000, geocities.com/TimesSquare/1001, etc. It was always fun to see a Guestbook entry from one of the people with sites next to mine.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sodimel 4y agoThis kind of content has found it's way on todays web on https://spacehey.com https://spacehey.com :)
- jacquesm 4y agoI ran a Geocities rescue site for years and it has since moved to a new owner, see reocities.com
- d--b 4y agoThe nostalgia for geocities sites gets a bit old... The website that's linked here is a million times better than all the sites it claims to be inspired by. In all honesty, most of geocities was crap, and every time you'd stumble on those sites with messy content and flashing "under construction" gifs, you'd just click away in no time.
- Semiapies 4y agoPeople have downvoted this, but it's true. I've read more praise for Geocities from nostalgic web geeks in the last few weeks than I ever saw from web geeks while Geocities actually existed. Especially since, at the time, web geeks who weren't starting out with HTML hated Geocities for being the source of everything wrong with web design. And then of course, half or more of Geocities' existence was as a largely forgotten hosting platform, after almost everyone who'd built a site there in its heyday had quickly abandoned it or otherwise moved on.
- throwawaycities 4y agoIt’s become the norm for big tech to acquire and kill off beloved products over the objections of passionate communities of users. For me that first experience was Yahoo acquiring and killing GeoCities, not to mention deleting 10’s of millions of websites from the early web in the process like it never existed paving the way for social media. I’ve spent the better part of a decade waiting, and in 2020 Yahoo’s trademark for GeoCities was finally cancelled by the USPTO, I filed for it using geocities.eth, in part, and successfully became the new owner of the GeoCities registered trademark. There is a new era of passionate website builders that are making the Internet fun again and they have inspired me. You can find some of them at the .eth website search engine https://esteroids.eth.limo https://esteroids.eth.limo If things go as planned, it may just be a matter of time before you’ll have the opportunity to build a geocities website once again, only this time your website(s) won’t be able to be rugged.
- Kye 4y agoAmazing: you've used a thread about one of the freest, least commercial eras of the web to plug some cryptocurrency/web3 bullshit and admit you took over one of the most memorable trademarks of that era to do it.
- kristofferR 4y agoWhat is bullshit about decentralized hosting with IPFS?
- Kye 4y agoThe ephemerality was a feature we didn't understand was a feature back then. Not everyone dreams of a perfect distributed record of everything the way crypto people do.
- throwawaycities 4y agoIf you think self expression through building websites was ephemeral for dominant social media sandboxes, that is great, but not everyone feels that way. Sort of as evidenced by this post on the front page of HN more than a decade after GeoCities was killed off by big tech.
- nazgulsenpai 4y agoI'm actually shocked the background MIDI played on my Android 12 phone. It put a huge smile on my face this morning! Thanks for the nostalgia OP!
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y agoThat's because it's not played as MIDI. The site is built with modern tech.
- kgwxd 4y agoI have autoplay turned off for everything. I have to click play twice on YouTube to start anything. Some sites don't work at all. Looks like MIDI doesn't get blocked by even the most strict settings.
- daneel_w 4y agoRest assured, the rotating cranium - a staple of 1990s web design - is present.
- stavros 4y agoIf you liked Geocities, Neocities is trying to recreate the vibe, and is an excellent project: https://neocities.org https://neocities.org
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bag_boy 4y agoAhhh very cool. Thanks
- chasd00 4y agoI recall no one really loving geocities but it was there. Looking back, it’s endearing given how user generated content became such a big thing. I feel the same about live journal which came a bit later iirc.
- vinny2020 4y agoSo much geeky expression. Something was definitely lost when we traded in our individual sites for social media profiles
- attasi 4y agoThis is beautiful! GeoCities represented the amazing creativity of the early web. I miss it :( If anyone would like to create a GeoCities-inspired site of their own using a no-code builder, we got you: https://clovercities.com https://clovercities.com.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago"Steve Buscemi Greetings!" - the first MemeGenerator?