XKCD commemerates GeoCities

Through early Monday, you can still request a special extra last-minute Internet Archive crawl of any GeoCities pages:

http://www.archive.org/web/geocities.php

(We've already got fairly good coverage, both historically and in extra crawls of the last couple months that don't yet appear in the Wayback Machine. But we're not sure we have everything, so if any sites are especially important to you, please nominate them.)

Being able to learn HTML in a weekend and put it up on a Geocities page was pretty much the start of my career (if you can call it that) of creating stuff for the web, something which I'm still loving 12? years later.

A grey, Times New Roman page 'About My Life' might not have seemed exciting to anyone else, but it was the same 'wow, I made that!' moment as the first time a BASIC program printed my name across the screen.

(On reflection, many of these beginnings are egotistical, aren't they?)

It strikes me that Kids These Days Don't Have It So Good. Stuff is complex now. A page with nowt but a <title> and <h1> tag looks rubbish. Back in the day, everything looked rubbish so your first page actually looked kinda cool. Obfuscating the real work through helpful frameworks and builders does help one get started, but there's always the sense that it's not really the same as starting from nothing.

I do wonder what the current, or immediate, equivalent to those magic first steps might be.

The source of the page has a few hidden gems, including:

    <SCRIPT LANGUAGE='SCHEME'>
    (define (eval exp env)
      (cond ((self-evaluating? exp) exp)
            ((variable? exp) (lookup-variable-value exp env))
            ((quoted? exp) (text-of-quotation exp))
            ((assignment?  exp) (eval-assignment exp env))
            ((definition? exp) (eval-definition exp env))
            ((if? exp) (eval-if exp env))
            ((lambda? exp) (make-procedure (lambda-parameters exp) (lambda-body exp) env))
            ((begin? exp) (eval-sequence (begin-actions exp) env))
            ((cond? exp) (eval (cond->if exp) env))
            ((application? exp)  (apply (eval (operator exp) env) (list-of-values (operands exp) env)))
            (else (error "Common Lisp or Netscape Navigator 4.0+ Required" exp))))
    </SCRIPT>

sigh But we should remember the social site of today is the GeoCities Site of the next decade. Though I think, despite the somewhat trite bleeps and blurps of the GeoCities era, there was a bloody ton of innovation and invention that occurred in and around this product. It's passing is the end of an era. Chat rooms, personal websites, web based socialization all began in the likes of a GeoCities.

I think it's telling of my age that I didn't even do a double take at that site. In fact, I had opened the link in a tab, forgot about it, came back later, and found myself thinking, "Who's embedding XKCD comics on their GeoCities page?"

I sometimes marvel at how much of history is "lost to the ages", even from the relatively recent past (i.e. ~1000 yrs). I find myself sometimes wondering if something similar might happen 1000 years from today. I can't say for sure, but I certainly think it's possible.

Lots of easter eggs in the source, nestled among the 94 errors and 4 warnings. My favourite:

    <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="QBASIC">IF $BROWSER = "IE" THEN GOTO 50</SCRIPT>

This is on the front page, so maybe this is a good place to remind people that GeoCities is being shut down today. If there is some content you want, make sure to download it and/or have the Internet Archive crawl it ASAP (See gojomo's comment).

It isn't over until the fat lady sings. Stay tuned :)

Truly genius website parody.

Nicely done.

When do we get to retire myspace, which is essentially geocities 2.0 ?

Awesome, spot on!