A Love Letter to Geocities Sites | Hacker News Reader

A Love Letter to Geocities Sites

cameronsworld.net

269 pointsmartialg111 comments

Ok, this is a long shot, but if any forum is likely to know, it's HN.

I first got my start in web development when I was around 8 (early 2000s) thanks to a very large (or at least it was to an 8 year old) purple book on HTML. There was one passing mention of how animated GIFs might be added to websites with an IMG tag. The example of the animated GIF they showed (they exploded the frames) reminded me of this image [0] on this wonderful site (although perhaps the seal was bouncing a ball rather than spinning the globe).

Anywho, if anyone can remember a large, big purple book on HTML from the early naughts, you'd make my day if you could send it my way.

[1] https://www.cameronsworld.net/img/content/10/7.gif

I think it was called "Mastering HTML4.0" or "HTML4.0 No Experience Required" if that narrows down your search. I also remember checking this book out from a library in my teens.

Another one with similar graphics might have been “HTML Goodies”

I got you fam: https://www.amazon.com/Yourself-Publishing-Professional-Refe...

Whoa, major flashbacks. I absolutely crushed this book or some edition of it.

Duuude!!! thanks!!! I read this when I was 10 or 11 and I haven't stop making web since then.

Now we all want to see the gif

Sadly, I think it was a partial false memory. There is indeed a section on making animated GIFs, but instead of a seal bouncing a ball, it's just a bouncing ball sans seal.

Here's a screenshot from the book (it's on Archive.org)

https://dl.sphericalcow.xyz/private/hn/0e66b5f993de9e96aaaee...

now the authors have updated your purple book in 2016: https://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&fiel...

This looks _really_ familiar. Will see if I can find a copy and verify! (Will also post the seal if I find it.)

UPDATE: So I found the book on Internet Archive [0] and I really think it's the real thing. Only caveat: no seal. There's a whole section on creating animated GIFs (which I recall the book I had having), but the example to create a GIF is not a seal bouncing a ball but rather just a bouncing ball sans seal (pg. 261). I'm pretty sure the seal was a false memory at this point.

I've thought of this book often, and I'm thankful to you for sending this my way. I'm 99% sure it's the book given the page count, cover, chapters, and year it was published. Even if it isn't though, it's a wonderful example of the sorts of references at the time.

Thanks again!

[0] https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780672314087/isbn_97806723...

Similar entry to making websites for me. Late 90s and this book “Creating Cool HTML 4 Web Pages”

https://www.amazon.com/Creating-Cool-HTML-Web-Pages/dp/07645...

This is amazing. I miss the days when the web truly felt like a vast tapestry of people energetically letting their freak flags fly.

Pave paradise, put up... an algorithm to maximize engagement.

Algorithms and the dev community today might freak out themselves if someone used one too many divs, or a bit to much JavaScript…

God help them if they saw the blink tag…

It even has/had a name: DIVitis. ;)

"DIVitis". Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

Ah, this is what React suffers from.

It doesn’t have to as you can use fragments (<><Stuff /></>) to avoid adding a wrapper div since a few years back

There's never been used as much javascript in the history of time as right now, and it's never been doing as little as it does right now :P

Because.. why use a perfectly good browser to render your html when you can implement another, lesser browser within the browser in javascript and have THAT render your html, but badly.

Also, divs and css for layouts suck, TABLES is the way to go :)

Mobile killed tables for layout.

Unless you replicate the table in different configurations and use CSS to show one for each screen size.

I miss tables

I still work on some old sites / code that uses tables.

I LOATH tables. Flexbox is so much easier.

Framesets -- I /love/ framesets and I still use them to make things!

There are a few places lurking in the shadows of social media that the algorithms never touch, where the freak flags still fly. When you stumble across those hidden gems, it is something magical.

You think the Web still isn't full of people letting their freak flags fly?

You can still see this on twitch, YT, tiktok, etc. Just like Geocities represents amateur or even naive web development/web design, there are the same types of people trying to create video content. Even Twitter (including the "weird Twitter" genre of tweets) and other social media sites are full of amateur commentators, writers, comedians, musicians, etc.

Web development/web design, including the tools and techniques available to the hobbyist has just gotten much more mature. People no longer feel like a kid in the candy store in terms of adding blinking text and rotating gifs, and tutorial websites are no longer showing these examples.

TikTok to Geocities is what AstroTurf is to real grass.

Of course there's still a lot of freaky flag-flying happening. I just meant that now it feels like everyone's shouting in the same room — a room 1/3rd full of people trying to maximize the cash value of shouting and 1/3rd full of straight-up grifters. Whereas in the late-90s millennium fever it felt more like you were laying out the crazy foundation of some optimistic future.

Sorry, but TikTok is not modern-day Geocities, not even a bit. The operative word is "City": Geocities let you browse individual "neighborhoods" of websites at your leisure. It stayed out of the way, giving you the satisfaction of discovering little weird nooks and crannies on your own time, just as you would by traveling to a real city. Website makers also weren't trying to go viral and be invited on to the Jimmy Kimmel show.

There is nothing organic about TikTok. You have to wade through a deluge of formulaic dance videos set to repetitive music clips for about an hour before the all-powerful algorithm determines that maybe you're not interested in that.

For a platform that probably has billions of videos (Geocities never did), discoverability outside of the algorithm is impossible, because the search functionality sucks.

If you liked Geocities, Neocities is trying to recreate the vibe, and is an excellent project:

https://neocities.org

Ahhh very cool. Thanks

Ah I long for the days when you could just use a few frames and throw an image map together for graphical navigation...

Image maps, when Netscape would show you the pixel coordinates in the status bar. We're talking 1995?

Invisible 1px GIFs for the tables...

HN still uses those!

You still can!

For free? That was what was so cool about that era of the internet. Shout out to all my angelfire ogs.

Yes, there's Neocities [1], as beautifully demonstrated by a fellow commenter in this discussion [2].

[1] https://neocities.org/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32315422

Oh, the shame - but I will out myself.

In the aftermath of the Barings bank collapse in 1995, and its purchase for £1 by ING, its private equity arm (Baring Private Equity Partners) - which was neither directly connected with the bank's activities, nor affected by them - wanted to ringfence itself from ING influence. It decided to commission a website and, I am still not sure how, I was asked to pitch for the job. I built a demo site, put it on a floppy and visited the BPEP offices to show the men in suits.

I built the site in BBEdit Lite in three or four days. As was the fashion at the time, my brief was "We want a website" and nothing more; no purpose was imagined and, other than when I asked for locations/addresses etc, no content was provided - not even for the legal notice, although this was signed-off on by their lawyers.

The site (made to be displayed 640 x 480, natch) used every sin in the canon: multiple nested frames for top menu and left-hand navigation; and, yes, it had an image map. The plan, for my part at least, was to use this as a placeholder and then move to something less embarrassing. That never happened, and I was paid to maintain my Frankenframed monster for more than a year before ING finally asserted themselves.

I've just unearthed a broken fragment from the Wayback machine [1], if anyone has the stomach to look at it. For best (!) results, follow this route map:

- The link should punt you to an obligatory legal warning page (and yes, this did necessitate duplicating the entire frame-based navigation - don't ask).

- When it loads, click on "worldwide" in the top menu. [Edit to add: the hotspots on the image map now take a while to react when you hover over them.]

- When what remains of that loads, click on the topmost orange triangle in the left-hand nav bar. That should give you an idea of how deep the rabbit hole went.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000303162503/http://www.bpep.c...

I had a look. Wasn't as bad as I expected based on what you'd said. In fact, for a 90s corporate website it looks fine. Nice job winning the pitch!

Ha! That's decent of you. I was actually quite proud of the site weight. The orange triangle gifs - one pointing to the right and another pointing downwards - weighed almost nothing, and everything nav-wise was optimised (transparency out of background colour) to the max. The nav font was their bespoke version of frutiger, hence the need for graphical nav elements.

When it all worked, there used to be historical quotes, which I'd culled from a privately published Barings history book I found in their offices, that appeared under the l-h nav elements. One, from Cardinal Richelieu, referred to Barings as one of the "three major powers in Europe".

The book also related how Barings joined forces with its archenemy Rothschilds (under the auspices of the British Relief Association [1]) to provide relief to Ireland during the potato famine, in the absence of meaningful action from the British government.

I really enjoyed the work, and learnt a lot of history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Relief_Association

I agree. This site looks fine for its time. Above-average, even.

There was show on here a few days ago (The dark side of the 90's) all about the Beenie Baby craze. It funny that they covered the website that was pitched by 2 teenagers with only a few days work and eventually approved.

Needless to say - it screams mid 90's web design.

https://web.archive.org/web/19961228114553/http://ty.com/

Truly awesome, right down to the Comic Sans.

It needs an "Under Construction" crane, the true mark of a 90s web design professional.

I miss the ugly internet.

It was ugly but it was also theirs, I respected that.

Exactly. Culture of actual personalization is just gone these days.

So much nostalgia in those gifs. I built my first website on Geocities in 1997. It was devoted to all the PC games my middle school self loved to play. I have fond memories of "visiting my neighbors" by checking out the addresses next to mine. e.g. geocities.com/TimesSquare/1000, geocities.com/TimesSquare/1001, etc. It was always fun to see a Guestbook entry from one of the people with sites next to mine.

I missed the Geocities time but my similar experience was MySpace. That my first introduction into any sort of code. I have no idea at the time what I was copying and pasting into my page. But was able to eventually learn and change things through it. Really no current platform that is used to allow this level of customization. At most it’s a banner or profile image to express yourself publicly.

Same here, Myspace (and my dad’s Macromedia Dreamweaver book) was my entry to code. Oh how I miss it!

I started working on a social network that’s basically that era of Myspace but got sidetracked by other projects. I’ll probably get back to it around the holidays.

It still exists, a young developer has recreated myspace (you can edit html & css on your profile!!1!): https://spacehey.com/

Here's a list of cool profiles to look into (may contain dead links): https://blog.spacehey.com/entry?id=1185

If someone would do that but for 2005-2010 Bebo, now we'd be flying.

I recall no one really loving geocities but it was there. Looking back, it’s endearing given how user generated content became such a big thing. I feel the same about live journal which came a bit later iirc.

Good medicine! I hope there are scores of us who see this and feel the immediate inspiration to recreate our old freak sites.

In created one a few years ago dedicated to a video game I played as a child:

https://laserblast.neocities.org/

I had to use CSS to implement a <blink> equivalent.

That camera with the stack of flashbulbs tho! Used to see that sort of thing at weddings and other family events all the time in the 80s.

Yes they were fun. Especially when your older brother wakes you up in the middle of the night by flashing one on your face.

I don’t remember them by the mid 80s. I remember them in the 70s and early 80s.

Yeah, that's true, they were definitely more of an early 80s thing. I certainly don't remember seeing anything like them later than primary school years.

That ad for the game, complete with a bored teenager. Perfection. I miss the 80's.

So much geeky expression. Something was definitely lost when we traded in our individual sites for social media profiles

Damn, and to think I almost skipped this link because I wasn't in the mood to read a letter!

Catscape Navigator 2.0

I'm actually shocked the background MIDI played on my Android 12 phone. It put a huge smile on my face this morning! Thanks for the nostalgia OP!

That's because it's not played as MIDI. The site is built with modern tech.

This is beautiful! GeoCities represented the amazing creativity of the early web. I miss it :(

If anyone would like to create a GeoCities-inspired site of their own using a no-code builder, we got you: https://clovercities.com.

Any old heads remember using HoTMetaL to write HTML? It was literally just a glorified text editor that inserted tags for you. I eventually learned HTML well enough from it that it became faster to just write pages in Notepad.

Gosh, yea. There were a ton of these little editors that popped up around that time. I can't remember the name of hardly any.

It’s become the norm for big tech to acquire and kill off beloved products over the objections of passionate communities of users.

For me that first experience was Yahoo acquiring and killing GeoCities, not to mention deleting 10’s of millions of websites from the early web in the process like it never existed paving the way for social media.

I’ve spent the better part of a decade waiting, and in 2020 Yahoo’s trademark for GeoCities was finally cancelled by the USPTO, I filed for it using geocities.eth, in part, and successfully became the new owner of the GeoCities registered trademark.

There is a new era of passionate website builders that are making the Internet fun again and they have inspired me. You can find some of them at the .eth website search engine https://esteroids.eth.limo

If things go as planned, it may just be a matter of time before you’ll have the opportunity to build a geocities website once again, only this time your website(s) won’t be able to be rugged.

Amazing: you've used a thread about one of the freest, least commercial eras of the web to plug some cryptocurrency/web3 bullshit and admit you took over one of the most memorable trademarks of that era to do it.

What is bullshit about decentralized hosting with IPFS?

The ephemerality was a feature we didn't understand was a feature back then. Not everyone dreams of a perfect distributed record of everything the way crypto people do.

If you think self expression through building websites was ephemeral for dominant social media sandboxes, that is great, but not everyone feels that way. Sort of as evidenced by this post on the front page of HN more than a decade after GeoCities was killed off by big tech.

Free? You must have missed the part of the era where big tech purchased geocities for >$3B and killed it over the objections of users & deleted it from the Internet save for efforts of some like the Internet Archive (I hope you donate to them).

Also must have missed the part about giving the IP to a community to govern.

You did manage to confirm the unusual disdain of all things decentralized in web3.

> of the era where big tech purchased geocities for >$3B and killed it

Pretty obvious that commenter was referring to before that happened.

Everything is free until it isn't.

What a shame that you're taking something beloved and nostalgic and turning it into yet another rent-seeking crypto project.

https://neocities.org/ has been around for years, is the same exact concept and doesn't come with any crypto-related baggage.

To say that decentralized IPFS hosting and free custom domains (unlike on neocities where custom domains is a paid feature) is a negative is absurd.

It's problematic that all Neocities cites are controlled by a commercial entity, that's exactly what killed Geocities. Decentralized hosting isn't "crypto-related baggage".

Rent seeking? Please enlighten me where you get rent seeking?

I feel the same way. The hairpin of emotions from excitement when I saw something promising like acquiring the expiring geocities trademark from the USPTO to yet another shit crypto project was disheartening. Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. Perhaps something can do something of value with it when the new trademark expires.

>Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. Perhaps something can do something of value with it when the new trademark expires.

Please expand upon this, give me your idea of victory and value.

The plan was to turn the IP over to community governance, so people like you who seem to care could have a voice in governing how the property is used. On one hand it seems like you might want a voice in how the IP is used, yet you also seem to think that giving community governance over the GeoCities IP is "another shit crypto project." It is far easier just to privately own and operate the property as a centralized entity & remove the decentralized governance component.

Has there been another crypto project that resurrected abandoned IP and turned it over to community governance? I'd love to review those other projects and see where they went wrong.

I see no mention of an intention or plan, very different things, to hand it over in the original comment.

You clearly know that snatching up the trademark for a beloved name and reusing it for a crypto project is going to be unpopular, given you took the time to make a throwaway account. So then why did you brag about your trademark, registered to your real name, which can be found in 30 seconds?

> given you took the time to make a throwaway account.

This account is more than a year old. I make lots of HN accounts and typically stop using them after 500karma.

Like I said web3 is not popular on HN, you don’t even know the project (nor do others) but show disdain anyway because it is “crypto”. That’s not a reflection on me and what I’m doing with GeoCities, but the a reflection on people that dislike a project not knowing what it is.

FYI you’re on a platform that invests in startups, one of the most successful being a cryptocurrency exchange that went public and is responsible for the growth of cryptocurrency with the masses.

>> "FYI you’re on a platform that invests in startups, one of the most successful being a cryptocurrency exchange that went public and is responsible for the growth of cryptocurrency with the masses."

The difference is YC has a long string of non-crypto successes. So when they do invest in crypto, people are less suspicious of it than they would be some random person plugging their crypto project.

Coinbase fills a need created by the chaos of crypto, the very chaos that causes the problems people criticize it for, and it does so reigning in the BS and creating a safe space for the few useful (or at least innocent) things like speculative investing and exchange. It's not like a DAO where you're counting on someone to write a good Ethereum contract that won't be rules lawyered by someone to take all the money. At this point the only thing that distinguishes it from a real bank is it handles crypto. Even the USD is FDIC-insured!

Try again.

>Try again

I don’t need to try again, I own the GeoCities trademark and IP.

I’m really not sure what you are on about in terms of your hate for crypto & DAOs but love for Coinbase, whatever it is, your suspicion isn’t a reflection on me and what I’m doing with GeoCities, it’s a reflection of yourself. Good luck with all that.

They say you haven’t made it until you have haters…so thanks for spending your time and energy confirming that I’ve arrived.

I ran a Geocities rescue site for years and it has since moved to a new owner, see reocities.com

Sites like this belong in a museum!

This is a masterpiece of fine art.

Rest assured, the rotating cranium - a staple of 1990s web design - is present.

I have autoplay turned off for everything. I have to click play twice on YouTube to start anything. Some sites don't work at all. Looks like MIDI doesn't get blocked by even the most strict settings.

The nostalgia for geocities sites gets a bit old...

The website that's linked here is a million times better than all the sites it claims to be inspired by.

In all honesty, most of geocities was crap, and every time you'd stumble on those sites with messy content and flashing "under construction" gifs, you'd just click away in no time.

People have downvoted this, but it's true. I've read more praise for Geocities from nostalgic web geeks in the last few weeks than I ever saw from web geeks while Geocities actually existed.

Especially since, at the time, web geeks who weren't starting out with HTML hated Geocities for being the source of everything wrong with web design. And then of course, half or more of Geocities' existence was as a largely forgotten hosting platform, after almost everyone who'd built a site there in its heyday had quickly abandoned it or otherwise moved on.

"Steve Buscemi Greetings!" - the first MemeGenerator?

This needs more upvotes! How is this not at the top of HN!

This kind of content has found it's way on todays web on https://spacehey.com :)

Five notable good things that happened after 1999:

1. Obergefell

2. First Black President

3. Wikipedia

4. .....idk, maybe CRISPR? Deep Learning? Avatar: The Last Airbender? I'm drawing a blank here

Diseases like Hep C were actually cured (a personal favourite counter to people who think medicine doesn't cure anything any more). Plenty of good things have happened, it's just you can spin any tech improvement as 'actually dooming us all' if you want to.

You have to admit that the internet was more fun when it was enthusiasts expressing themselves, though. That’s the point of the post.

Yes :)

perhaps people here who haven't seen it should go check out https://neocities.org/

I created a site there dedicated to a video game I played as a child:

https://laserblast.neocities.org/

It was a lot of fun to build.

I had to use CSS to implement a <blink> equivalent.

There's so many amazing sites people have made on Neocities. I personally didn't have the ethos and dedication to stick with it, but the fusion of creativity and technical skill makes it something else.

Aren’t places like TikTok full of enthusiasts actively expressing themselves?

TikTok is filled popularity enthusiasts. That is their only concern: winning the algorithm lottery. It is a completely different environment than the web prior to 2.0. I... would hope you would know this?

I’m sure you know the motivation of every TikToker. And in the old days, no one tried to promote their website or find viewers? I guess the reason for web rings and why every little page had a view counter had nothing to do with wanting to be seen?

Or maybe your chauvinism make you think that showing of some technical prowess (because HTML with a bit of ecma script was really hard), is for some reason more valuable than dancing, singing, crafts or stupid jokes?

Hep B is still not curable, and unfortunately, there is still a high stigma that it's sexual related disease while a vaccine exists.

Duke Nukem Forever was actually released

Also, 9/11, and war on terror started (and never ended I guess, terror is still around)

"Oh yeah, we drone-striked that wedding party, but trust us, these guys were horrid!"

Yessir! Nothing wins you respect and admiration among the "liberated" population faster than extra-judicial killings!

Gwern.net has got you covered: https://www.gwern.net/Improvements

This comment needs to be accompanied by a soyjak.

Sorry, what was that? I have a job and a wife and kids so I'm not always up on the latest internet memes.

It's one of a set of image macros people with no personality use to express their feelings on something. Like an emoji, but it signals the user is insufferable and hangs out with equally obnoxious people. Often paired with that frog that was so abused by twits that the comic's creator killed the character off.

Pepe is still a beautiful soul if you ask me. He didn't deserve all that awfulness that happened in his name.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com