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Why I loved Geocities



You might have heard about Yahoo shutting down Geocities. Yahoo acquired it in January 1999 and after 15 (10 of them under Yahoo) years of hosting  all kind of pages (a lot of them having funky .gif images hammering in 'Under construction' messages and in between they offered most arcane information about most obscure topics ) they finally shut down the service on 26th October 2009.
 Around 7+ million public web pages and 8+ million images (according to Google), gone leaving internet with lot of dead links and broken images (thanks to hotlinking) and 404s.

On 26th I spent some time randomly browsing through (and saving) some Geocities sites, stumbled across this 'sean connery on moon' image and remembered what a delight these pages used to be. In pre-blog days (and in some cases even in clatter of blogs) it obviously had some of the most labored upon user generated online content, labour not just of working with HTML and creating all those gif files.

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Projects that salvaged some of the data from Geocities:
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Comments

  1. ghoshbabaNov 29, 2009, 6:18:00 PM

    I share the sense of loss that geocities closing down seems to bring. Nice of you to salvage some of those sites.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Vinayak RazdanNov 29, 2009, 7:52:00 PM

    Do checkout the links to those geocities shrines.

    ReplyDelete

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