GeoCities is not completely dead | Hacker News Reader

GeoCities is not completely dead

google.com

126 pointsalter854 comments

I ran a search for "site:geocities.com/Area51" to see if the old free hosting webpages are still alive. Found this gem:http://www.geocities.com/area51/3253/

It's very easy to look down our collective noses at Geocities, but I really feel I owe virtually everything I have to their free 2mb hosting. I learned the ins and outs of FTP from uploading my first webpages - webpages that taught me how HTML works. I did my best to hide their sponsor banners with my first JavaScript.

Everyone has access to their own Facebook profile and the like these days, so the idea of owning your own space on the Web is kind of archaic.

But is there still an equivalent of Geocities for modern Internet users?

I believe you can get free hosting on Amazon, Google AppEngine, Heroku, etc. I'd say the learning curve is much steeper now however.

What is great about that site is that the site footer and all the annoying icons/ads/membership rings is longer then the body of the site.

I'd very much like to own my own space on the web. Particulary to run core things that really matter to me like device-sync, backup, basic sharing etc. I'm sure I could set something up using EC2/S3 but I don't want the hassle of maintenance (or to reinvent the wheel).

Edit: I'm kind of asking for an app-store-for-the-cloud but with a place that I own into which I 'install' the apps.

You could check out http://owncloud.org/

I am using cheap VPS for that, with debian (so it even has "apps" in aptitude :))

I cannot recommend it highly enough... it's great for doing quick perl experiments and even coding from phone/tablet through power of vi and screen, it's great for hosting personal projects that almost noone will visit

what I miss the most on my cheap vps is the ability to run java virtual machine, since it has smallish memory and is on openvz (so no swapping)

What VPS are you using? Is "cheap VPS" ~$20/month?

See http://www.lowendbox.com/ for < $10/m.

Look around, you'll find them. I found a Minecraft server host that actually gives me root access to a VPS with MC preinstalled. I disabled MC and now have a VPS with which to do what I please.

I don't know if it's the best deal out there because I haven't looked in a while, but the host I'm on is http://redstonehost.com/ if you're curious.

I am in Czech Republic, so it will probably be no use to you

I pay the equivalent of 7.39 USD/month

http://www.bezobav.cz/vps-virtualni-server.html

For me it was Angelfire, but basically the same thing.

IMO, the place to go today is PHPFog for their free Wordpress hosting. Wordpress as a CMS is a million times more sophisticated than Geocities, but when you're ready to make the jump into something more complicated you have access to the codebase (unlike Wordpress.com where you have to pay to customize the design).

Its funny that this topic came about. I remember the olden days as a kid where I would browse around looking for DBZ info. Almost every site seemed to be a Geocities or Angelfire blog.

Recently, I've been thinking about signing up for Angelfire to run the production blog for my website. You know, just as a gag. I'll have it look just like a site pre-2000s. This will be my nod to those sites that came before me.

My EYES! MY EYES! THEY BURRRRRRNNNN! http://rocdisjoint.angelfire.com/

Isn't Tumblr the modern Geocities?

Sans the creativity.

Heh, obviously you've never used Tumblr before. Tons of people that I follow learn basic HTML and CSS by customizing their blog's theme, and the end result is insanely creative and unique blog layouts.

Not only that, but a lot of the content they're posting is original and creative as well. Whether it's original art, stories, poems, collages of gifs from a favorite TV show, etc, it's extremely easy (in my experience) to find creativity on Tumblr.

Your comment doesn't add to the discussion and is simply inaccurate.

You are still working around rules and a framework. Geocities gave you free run of HTML & JS to go nuts.

For example: Geocities accidently gave me my first experience designing backend as a service when I was a teenager.

I had built a website using some PHP but I had a budget of ~$0 for hosting and I couldn't find any free PHP webhosting that also offered mysql and didn't have extremely stringent bandwidth restrictions (I wanted to allow downloads of some fairly large .exes for VB6 games I had made) I used my home internet connection for playing online games so I didn't want people downloading files from that either.

My solution was to host all of the files and the front end of the site on geocities (which had a much better bandwidth limit but didn't support PHP) and redirect all of the POST forms to a Pentium2 linux box running off my home internet connection (with dyndns to take care of the dynamic IP issue). The form submission would sometimes (if it needed to update the site frontend) kick off a script which would FTP the new content to geocities. It could then just redirect you back to geocities once the form submission was done.

Absolutely: Heroku gives away free instances.

http://www.heroku.com/

Rather than learn the basics of FTP kids today learn the basics of git deployment.

The (now-discontinued) DropBox Public folders weren't too far off.

http://www.weebly.com/ has been quietly hosting millions of free websites for years. They're a YC company from back in the day (W2007), and an awesome bunch of folks with a really cool service.

I'd say wordpress and tumblr are both close to equivalents?

HTML was much easier in those days since people didn't really expect much from a website and tags/css was much more limited.

Want a bright pink page with flashing animated zombies? Just:

Wow, real Geocities.com domain? I wonder if someone missed a server when decommissioning the cluster? I thought this was going to refer to the fact that you can replace geocities.com with reocities.com and get most sites. http://www.reocities.com/newhome/makingof.html

> I wonder if someone missed a server when decommissioning the cluster?

I submitted because I wanted to hear a possible explanation. I see that some sites have some nested content, but nothing found when you go to their root. Is it because they are just missing index.html? EDIT: thanks for correcting me, sp332.

http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/grub-w2k-HOWTO.html http://www.geocities.com/soho/7373/

This one works, it even has a tracking pixel :) http://www.geocities.com/epark/

Wow. Clicked a few and got; a guy selling wooden carvings of ships, a lodge resort in Oklahoma, and "Cafe Cokin is an Unofficial Cokin Filter System web site".

They don't make the internet like that anymore.

Poor guy is looking at his google analytics this morning and hoping he is going to sell a bunch of wooden ships from all this new traffic to his website, only to be disappointed.

It would be nice to send him emails asking about those wooden carvings of ships to restore his faith in the Internet.

Google Analytics? Don't you mean the spinning odometer at the bottom of the page? ;)

Hmmm.

I wonder what the ROI would be on giving away 100 MB FTP/www space in exchange for ads...

It's like looking through time! On another note, Bandung, Indonesia seems like a nice vacation spot.

This guys woodcarvings are absolutely incredible. Fully detail MRAP? A wooden F-2002? I'll take one!

http://www.geocities.com/wcaindonesia/

They are indeed incredible. I can imagine a market selling these as decoys to third-world militaries.

Military decoys have to be better than that. Check out what they actually use:

http://ravenaerostar.com/products/inflatables/military-decoy...

Filtered for the past year: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Ageocities.c...

These are mostly redirects to new domains from Geocities. I didn't realize that Google did that, which is interesting. It's also interesting the number of people who migrated off Geocities, but still kept their old geocities pages to redirect to their new ones. Can't make people update those bookmarks...

My high school yearbook senior quote has a link to my geocities.com page. I thought I was brilliant for thinking of it. :(

A lot of sites were cloned to geocities.ws as well. My "apple dance" site (banjo kazoo soundtrack and all) was zombified at http://geocities.ws/appledance2001/

It's embarrassing but historical.

Troop 321 - done for a merit badge?

not sure what you're referring to.

I viewed the source of your page.

It reads:

Original: Dan Kirkpatrick (webmaster@troop321.org)

oh I must have grabbed some code from somewhere.

This guy has a working widget to weather underground with today's weather. http://photographic-exploration.com/

Just found this clone called oocities.org. I had no idea my old mugen website was saved here. Unfortunately most of it isn't working. But it's certainly a nice nostalgic feeling to revisit my old website :)

Anyone interested Mugen characters and stages? Java applets simulating starcraft units using a physics engine? Winamp AVS plugin samples that will show a smiley face singing along your music or a guy running in the rain using math to generate the lines? Then you're welcome to my 2001 website ^^

http://www.oocities.org/vibhp/us.html

ASCII art page last updated March 2001. This was someone's labor of love and creative outlet for a long time.

http://www.geocities.com/spunk1111/kids.htm

God, I remember seeing that site years ago. Blast from the past.

They even still index some reported attack pages...

This is a great resource on the relative short history of HTML. Quirksmode, font tags, table-based layouts, etc.

So wait, did they shut it down or not?

Wow...on a related note it looks like cybertown.com is still alive as well. Ah, the late 90s...

What happened to my EnchantedForest/Tower/5436!?

I remember that first i-frame site I built when I was 10...

1490 updates during the last 12 months - 131 past month - 21 past week

Steve Zito is my new hero.

Somewhere, Jason Scott is laughing. Probably in the middle of petabytes of storage at the Archive.org World Headquarters.

http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=GeoCities

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2298

Reply on news.ycombinator.com