There has been (sort of) much ado the last few weeks about the turn of the page for one of the great eras of the World Wide Web – that of the “Portal Page” – Angelfire, Tripod, GeoCities and so on wherein anyone with a little time and a flame in their heart for any given subject could sign up for a free account and point and click to put together a page of , animated gifs, floating banners and all sorts of other design atrocities.
As Yahoo finally calls it quits on GeoCities (after the company purchased it for $4.7 billion in 1999 hoping to make it profitable) its kin – Ask Jeeves, Tripod and Angelfire are clearly next in line for the weedwhacker.
Regardless of their garish, impossibly difficult to navigate nature, GeoCities pages still had value in the culture in that people who didn’t really want or necessarily care about learning coding, could still share their little piece of the world with the rest of us. And many of this site belie a great amount of time and love spent on their subject matter.
In a way it’s bad timing for GeoCities to go down just as the next iteration of the web – that of data-extraction – is about to unfurl; the new data extraction, aggregation and re-publication wave could possibly suck out all the good stuff from these antiquated portals and reframe them in a far more favorable and accessible manner.
But maybe that is giving it too much: perhaps GeoCities was more about what Mcluhan was thinking when he said – the medium is the message – all about flashing things and dancing hamsters – and less about the content.
Regardless, rather than rehash all the facts and figures or wax poetic, I simply want to share a list of great, classic GeoCities pages so you can have one last look at them before they are gone for good:
http://www.geocities.com/mister_s_13/
http://www.geocities.com/soho/1469/flw.html
http://www.geocities.com/doowopp21/
http://www.geocities.com/takoda_magick/
http://www.geocities.com/hankmcintyre/
http://www.geocities.com/skashow/
http://ar.geocities.com/coventgardencattery/
http://www.geocities.com/mike_priller125/
http://www.geocities.com/fastmanfunnay/
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Horizon/5384/
http://geocities.com/fischma01/
http://br.geocities.com/vfdesigner/
http://www.geocities.com/a1pyro/
http://www.geocities.com/mvopsu/collegefootball.html
http://www.geocities.com/stonehedgefarms/
http://www.geocities.com/lionscave1/?200923
http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/Downs/4455/
http://www.geocities.com/iam_ironman2002/
Farewell GeoCities websites – I’ll miss your ugly face.
Special thanks to Lowres from the forums at http://freedom.constantchange.com for inspiring this piece.