Recommend following https://twitter.com/GIFmodel and 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).
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?
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-.... I put the website (pure HTML) up here: https://maxis-ville.kloppenborg.net/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=cameronsworld.net
https://www.cameronsworld.net/