Share your favorite stories about GeoCities

It's official: GeoCities, once one of the most trafficked sites on the Web, has officially seen its last day. It's a sad time for many of us who cut our Web teeth on GeoCities.

GeoCities might have featured millions of sites that were ugly and poorly designed, but the site let us get on the Web for free. It was simple. And it brought value to millions of folks around the globe.

That's why I wanted to take a quick moment to send off GeoCities in, what I hope, is the right way. Let's use this space as a place to share our favorite memories of using GeoCities. Whether it's browsing its many sites or creating a site of our own, I think it might be neat to share at least one experience we had using the old site.

So, allow me to get that discussion started.

Back in the late 1990s (the exact year escapes me), I came across GeoCities. It seemed so revolutionary for its time. I didn't have the Web expertise to develop a site of my own, so I relied on GeoCities to do the job for me.

My site was ugly. There's no doubt about it. But for the time, it wasn't too bad.

I used my little corner of the Web to review video games. At that point in my life, video games meant (almost) everything to me. Every spare moment I had was used up by the digital characters I controlled on the screen in front of me.

Perhaps that's why the idea behind my GeoCities site made so much sense to me at the time: to offer reviews like those I had read in the many video game magazines I subscribed to. I had a scoring system, gave my take on everything from controls to gameplay, and ended each review with a "bottom line." It was fun.

But in the end, I slowly drifted away from my Geocities site. Ironically, I never thought a career in writing was for me. I moved on with my life. And, much like GeoCities, my small part of the Web was left to live out its final days alone, without much interaction.

Even so, that small site was my first foray into the online world. And although I would have liked to spend more time refining my GameSpot-wannabe, I have no regrets. It was fun while it lasted.

Now it's your turn. Tell us your own GeoCities stories or experiences in the comments below.

[ryanw19]

haha my story is strangely similar to Don's. I built a website when I was 12 or 13. It was called the playstation gaming network (I know, lame and I'm not sure what was "networked" about it other than the fact it was on the www). If I remember correctly I had a madden 2002 review on my page as well as FF7, FF8, and FF9.

I had good ideas for my page but never knew how to implement them. I wanted to use a drop-down box for users to select a game to see information on, but never figured out how to do it through the geocities webdev application. That's where the PGN died. I gave up and moved on to other hobbies. Nearly a decade later, I'm doing web development and database programming for a living.

[Rod Roddy]

Fav stories about GeoCities?!?....seriously?

Yeah, I admit it: I was a GeoCities mark back in the day. My web development experienced began when I built a Cape Breton Oilers website on there back in late 1995 (and I didn't even have a PC of my own yet; I used the college computers to do it!). GeoCities was a great place for me to not only increase my knowledge of HTML and other web languages, but also to create all sorts of websites and be as creative as I could possibly be with them.

[inachu1]

I created a webpage for 9-11 with my own photographs of the pentagon burning.

[BlackxxJapan]

I remember I started a Neopets guild webpage there. I hated the ads a lot haha. It was extremely crappy, no layout just had all the content centered and those awful 'websafe' colors that were trademark of the earlier days.

That must have been 7 or 8 years ago. I'm too lazy to figure out exactly :D

[uptheanteater]

Poof! More spam gone.

[lilyinblue]

I was fifteen years old when I made my first GeoCities site. It was a fan site dedicated to my favorite band (at the time)... the Spice Girls. I did pretty good. I ran it for a about a year and a half and in that time, had over 250,000 unique visitors and was ranked as one of the top Spice Girls fan sites on the web (in the mid-late 90s).

Wanting to learn more and do more in terms of design (and branching out of Geo's EZ editors) and wandered my way over to their official help chat room. I went there for help and stayed. In those days, most of the WYSIWYG editors were so limited that I learned to code HTML by hand using just Notepad. I went from needing help to being the help. I eventually became an "official" chat helper and an active member of the Community Leader program in the SunsetStrip neighborhood.

Now, at 27 years old, I'm a front-end web developer. I am our company's HTML and CSS guru. I fully credit my time on Geo for giving me the foundation and skills for everything I do professionally today. In all honesty, it's done more for my career than my college degree!

[filter2k]

lol GeoCities + MySpace = web slag

[noodle77]

my babies! so much of my early internet life was spent at geocities. i started at geocities back in 1997, in hollywood/boulevard/2045! it had the animated gifs and the blinking.. i didn't know how to change link color so it was that generic blue and green written in comic sans ms. my sister taught me basic HTML so i could do more things with the site. my favorite thing was those line graphics. i became a community leader in heartland, and that was fun.

after yahoo took it over, i got a bit disgusted with how things moved, and didn't really like them anymore. though i still spent large amounts of time in geocities help chat, and formed some friendships that i still have today. the bandwidth limits on my site kept knocking it down daily, so i eventually had to move to a real pay host. that was about '02, i think. it is still up and running today, updated almost daily after 12 years.

i made tons of sites at geocities. it was a passion that eventually i went to college for and got a degree in multimedia and web design.

pre-yahoo geocities.. you will be missed.

[lordnykkon]

wow. i remember the sound of the 33k modem crackling to life and visiting the(pre-yahoo) geocities neighborhood pages. randomly clicking on a lot and visit some homesteader's random page about the onset of Alternative Rock, or 256 color pics of the upcoming Ultra 64, or Princess Diana's death. hit the back button on the ol' netscape navigator and visit another lot/page. Mine was in SoHo. helped me learn html, because i'd start looking at professional site's page sources and learning all the tags so I could try it out on geocities page builder. good times.

[ReverendRednose]

I don't know how many years ago it was, but I loved using Geocities to build my first web pages. I uploaded pictures and wrote little stories featuring the antics in my life. I had a bunch of friendly folk who shared my appreciation for getting to share a webpage for free. I even created one for my rock and roll band, The Rockerfellers and posted pictures after each of our jams. I kept relatives and friends updated with family news and pictures of recent events. I was sad when I received word that the days of Geoctiies were ending but now at 60, I can say I have only fond memories of the site and I thank those who made it happen. I enjoyed visiting countless others versions of webpages and know we shared a special time.

[jarturof]

I created a site to review movies, incredible that it was my movie critic space and now there are sites that allow users to review movies, givin stars.

I learn HTML by seen the code of other sites, and to made the images, I scanned a few photos from magazines and other I draw using PAINT!! imagine, after a few years I manage to learn how to use Paint Shop Pro (now part of Corel)

In 1997 I got sued by MTV Networks because I had the only spanish site of Nickelodeon and all the nick characters (VIACOM loves law suits) part of the site was hosted by the free Geocities! After that scary moment in my life (I was 15) I decided to erase all my sites and stopped making more.

I now work in marketing, in part because of what I did in those sites.

[jimzzzak]

I published my first webpage called "The Three-Eyed Girlfriend" there.

It was just a series of experiments to see what was involved in the process, using text and pictures. Very primitive, as my sites still are.

I had a lot of fun with it and I was disappointed to find that I don't have an archive of it anywhere.

[oldgreycat]

My first website was on GeoCities - an unofficial fan site devoted to my favorite artists, including David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young, that I launched in 1997. Way cool - I reviewed official releases, bootlegs, videos and concerts, received the occasional freebie, had contributors from around the world and earned enuff money via links to CDnow (remember them?) to buy a new CD or two a month. The best, however, was that Crosby granted me not one but two interviews. (He was a classy, cool dude.) In 2000 I moved the site to another host, but by then I'd grown bored w/it... I still own the URL, though.

[jayj3000]

my geocities pages back in high school (96-98) were dedicated to sneakers, 2pac, and outkast lol....i thought i was so cool when i had my black page and found flame gifs to squiggle around on it lol....i use gif fonts very heavily.

[Gizmo_kratz]

I started with Alta Vista and moved to Geocities becasue all my friends were there. I have maintained my free web pages at Geocities for 11+ years. Back in 23 April 2009, when Yahoo announced they were stopping the free version, I backed my site up on a hard drive. After today's news, I am glad that I took that percaution. Now I have to find a new homepage. Any suggestions?

[Ali_Babua]

I just signed up for an account on jimdo.com - I haven't done much of anything on it yet, but it seems like it might work alright. There are other options as well, such as 000space.com (don't know anything about it).

[pradsz]

At age 12, my dad made me take HTML classes, telling me "this is the future, son, so you might as well understand it." He then had me register with this start-up site called Geocities, and told me to design a website with what I had learned in class. So, I spent an entire summer carefully crafting every section of the site, an audio/video/pictorial tribute to his Royal Airness Michael Jordan. 13 years later, I still remember the website by heart (www.geocities.com/track/colosseum/4437). Wherever you are, pour some liquor out for Geocities - the original home page.

[theoneandonlyspaceghost]

I also started out with my first web site at Geocities. Later (around 1998 or so) I started another site by trying out another service called WebSpawner.com. Like Geocities, the WebSpawner page creation was easy to use and understand, and best of all it was also free. When Yahoo dropped the free Geocities pages earlier this year, I re-created my other site at WebSpawner too. As far as I know they don't have any plans to stop offering free web pages; they also offer a paid version (with no ads, extra pages, image galleries, etc.) but it's and optional thing and there prices are affordable. If I didn't have WebSpawner I would probably miss Geocities, but I really can't say that I have missed it at all.

[rickhigginshtbr]

At the age of 14, I had one of the larger, more complete, though, NES/SNES rom sites around... and now at 26, I'll whoop anyone in RBI Baseball 3...

[midnight_caper]

When i was probably 13 my parents purchased our first computer, it was a Pentium 486!! With our good ol' US-Robotics 56k modem i got online and started browsing the net. I think i found GeoCities by chance and decided to make a Christina Aguilera fan page. I printed out an entire do-it-yourself HTML guide and wrote the whole site by hand. I probably updated it for a year or so.

I never gave it much credit, but now that I think about it, GeoCities and TalkCity were the two sites that sparked my interest in programming. I am now an accomplished automation programmer and .NET software developer. Thanks GeoCities!!

[vkreal]

GeoCities was my first web site back in the 90's..can't believe its gone. i highly recommend using http://www.pagefin.com/ its completely free