I wasn't yet 13. Thankfully lying on the Internet wasn't a crime then.
The year was 1995, and this really awesome place called GeoCities let you create your own website — for free! Of course, it was a really strange process. They had these "neighborhoods" so that each website could be categorized. Each neighborhood had a sub-neighborhood. Then you picked your address, and your website was laid out in the neighborhood like a little house. How adorable!
I can't remember exactly to which topic the first installment of my website catered, but I do remember, over the course of GeoCities' zenith, sharing MIDI files, writing about Super Nintendo games, and sharing information about this Magic: The Gathering-spinoff card game called Spellfire. (God, weren't the 90s great?) Over time I kept adding new features, learned about these great HTML codes that let you blink text and create "frames," and added these really sweet fire-animated GIFs. Look how far we've come since landing on the moon.
It was an amazing collection of websites for its time. And much like the fabled Atlantis, its descent into a permanent oceanic slumber is nigh. Yahoo! pulls its plug today, suffocating a million poorly-designed yet sentimentally-valued primordial "blogs."
Once GeoCities was sold to Yahoo! in 1999 for $3.6 billion "dollars," it was supposed to be a landmark shift in the Internet. But the damn thing just never quite took off, because the websites are rather hard to create for most people from scratch. The ease of use just wasn't there. Perhaps that's why I quite enjoyed it.
My junior year of high school, I distinctly remember using my GeoCities site for a school assignment, and I was the only one in the class to make a website for it. Everyone else compiled some kind of PowerPoint. Perhaps it was because of my hatred for that application, but more likely it was the tenacity to be different, and also to give my neglected yet beloved website a practical application. Back in 2000, websites were still the last refuge for not just nerds, but nerds who could wallow through HTML.
Article comments
1 - Jon Sobel
Ah, memories. And how many "webrings" was your site a member of? Remembering webrings?
2 - Matthew T. Sussman
Dude, I created my own webrings. What a great way to meet other people!
3 - Robert M. Barga
I learned to code on GeoCities. That basic coding got me into advanced coding, both for the interwebs and for programs, which got me multiple jobs. Woot for Geocities
also, XKCD had a great memorial for it
4 - PrimeBlogger
I thought geoCities was already offline :)
Right I think geocities was the first web presence for a lot of us, now we have much better services like facebook or posterous. A few days ago I found a web page from homestead.com :)