Important Notice: GeoCities is Closing.
I just got the worst news of my life:
Dear Yahoo! GeoCities customer,
We're writing to let you know that Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community, is closing on October 26, 2009.
On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files.
Well...not the worst news in my life but Geocities was my first sandbox and I owe a lot of my HTML/CSS web growth to my free Geocities account. Too bad Yahoo! eventually bought it out and drove it into the ground. There will always be a need for free hosting providers for young web experimenters and GeoCities was just that for a lot of us.
Did you "grow up" on Geocities like I did? Share your experience!
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The HTML
For the sake of this...
:( Bye bye GeoCities!
I grew up on GeoCities too, it was THE only free webhosting provider I knew, I loved it big time.
October 26, 2009 never forget. I am sure we are all saddened by this news. Where oh where will I host my sites about n64 games?!
While geocities has been an integral part of the web for a while, you don’t need free hosting to get started with HTML, etc. For instance, I run a LAMP server off of my linux box and tinker on localhost, which serves me a whole lot better than geocities. Why? Well, because I have virtually unlimited database size, I can add or remove support for various languages (ruby, php, etc.) and I don’t have to upload something every time I change it.
So while geocities will be missed, it won’t leave a void.
@Drew Douglass: OMG! I had n64 sites too! My sites were: N64 Cheat Codes, Mortal Kombat, GoldenEye, and South Park. N64 was the big one though! Awesome!
Good thing I have my old school websites hosted on Angelfire…lol. – http://www.angelfire.com/indie/noseboneTHPS/. David, what’s the URL of your Geocities site anyway?
I grew up on FreeWebs myself but I don’t think that is around anymore or at least their name changed.
First got started on geocities and made a Joke website. Good god it was horrible, an ungodly red background, with just regular hyper links, no css. And like everyone else I had a wonderful counter at the bottom. Possibly the ugliest thing ever, good god how we progress.
November 1996 was when I unveiled my first web page. And it was on Geocities. Using some really old Mac at university, it was a rather tortuous experience uploading content (using Fetch), but I remember the excitement of getting on the web. I eventually did some actual content, hosting an internet column I wrote for the university’s student rag.
Geocities was, looking back, the best way of getting a presence on the internet. The way that you could define the URL by locations such as Silicon Valley etc. then subdistricts. It was a useful metaphor at the time, copied by the later Fortune City free homepage website.
I’m sorry to see it go. I’m guessing it will live on via the Wayback Machine though, so they will always be a reminder of how some of us first cut our teeth on the Web… for better or for worse!
DreamHost was offering FREE 2 years of web hosting including domain registeration to existing GeoCities customers couple months ago.
http://blog.dreamhost.com/2009/04/24/theyre-internet-history/
I was a Tripod person myself. I like to go back and look at the first site I ever built every once in a while. It actually was my Sophomore year high school English project: http://godol5299.tripod.com/englishhomepage.html
Man, I ought to download that whole site just for reminiscing sake.
My experience with geocities when i was young wasnt nice. All website i visited always were outdated, full of ads and worst design ever…
So, when i was in google or yahoo looking for something, i always avoided geocities xD
My first baby website is still hosted by Geocities! OMG that’s really sad to learn that it will be gone soon!! This is my website of 10yrs old! LOL Just Learnt HTML back then n wrote it – http://geocities.com/eunice_khong
Like @adam, I was a tripod man. I had a website about roller coasters on there!
I never created any geocities website. I don’t give a damn if it’s closing, I am a llmp(ython) boy btw.. just to mention like Anon did some replies above.
How many months old is this news now?
I used in my firsts attempts in web developing too. A happy day was when i discovered how to avoid ads using the noscript tag… Happy days..
Well any Geocities users who want to migrate their site to a new free platform are very welcome at mydragndrop.com :-)
I was so happy to see my first web site online. My head was straight and was proud of myself. i said to myself “Now i owe a website”.
Geocities made this possible to me. And im sure that was one among my inspiration for the leap in IT. I agree with David. For young developers to grow up ther must always be free and easily available services like this..
SAD TO HEAR YAHOO IS SHUTING DOWN
http://www.whats new.com
This is pretty sad news because it was my first one as well. I still remember my address! http://www.geocities.com/tokyo/towers/3665
Rolls off the tongue doesn’t it? Well I still remember it fondly after 12 years. I could never fill that 2mb storage space either :)
Hmmm…. This was my first webhost provider . I don’t use it for years already but I thought Yahoo will keep it live.
I find it sad, really. When I was using Geocities when I was like 12 or 13 years old is what got me into the game.
Every one should remember that awesome feeling you had when you could make your website on there, and give it to friends and they could see it.
I miss my geocities account. I hated the sidebar hmmm….. Is piczo still around?
the jimdo life boat will transfer your content for you if you want to keep your old pages in geocities
Jimdo
Just found interesting site:
http://geocities-closing.com/
Anybody knows something bout it?
I started on Freewebs a LONG time ago, used Geocities a lot too, but I was so happy when I finally got a free host that used PHP when I was learning it.