A website that deletes itself once indexed by Google

htaccess didn't exist in 1996.

This site ran on IIS 1.0 on Windows NT 3.51. For scripting we used a prerelease Coldfusion version. (i.e. the version before 1.0, which was released as we were developing the site, partially based on feedback we provided as we tested it.)

> How did you prevent any visitor from deleting the site?

A security token in the url which was secret. The worry was that some admin would try to submit the site to altavista for indexing without removing the token from the url first.

The whole thing about POST vs GET that everyone knows today for read only vs write was not that well known back then.

Back then you used GET for things with a small number of variables, and POST when you expected enough data that it wouldn't fit in the URL. It was all about the URL, not about the effect of the request.

Edit:

Yeah, 'noarchive' can be specified via the meta tag or via header. Also available to you are a handful of other directives such as NoIndex, NoFollow, NoArchive, NoSnippet, NoTranslate, etc...

See these links for more in-depth info about the directives & which search engines support what:

Directives & Usage in Meta tags - http://noarchive.net/meta/

Usage in Response Headers - http://noarchive.net/xrobots/

But should anyone disagree with you, now they're going to have to do the heavy lifting for YOUR side. That disrupts the willingness someone has to even converse with you, and if someone retorts with similarly Laconian wit, you can see the conversation breaks down really fast, because nobody is willing to put in the extra effort to flesh out someone else's opinion when there's no reciprocity or show of effort.

It's interesting while it's being built, but it's also interesting to look back and reflect on the bigger picture, outside of the buzzwords and technical terminology used to pull the creation through, and make it actualized.

I look forward when critics and theorists start thinking about the goal of the internet from a social perspective, a collective cultural subconscious directive. I look forward to all the kinds of art history theoretical methodology used to explain the significance of Picasso or Manet in their respective time periods, to use the same kinds of methodology to reason about the relation between the internet and everything that is not the internet.

It's interesting when some information gets washed away and other information is retained through time, and it isn't always the stuff that is indexed that is retained. The idea that art critics can even agree to call the same collection of works "cubism" or "impressionism" fascinates me, and I look forward to the same kinds of invented vocabularies being used to describe various processes, movements, and patterns throughout internet culture (way beyond studying memes and tropes - there are so many layers to the collective psyche of the internet, it is dumbfounding).

I don't know what geocities represents. I'd have to define it's 'kind' and compare and contrast it to other 'kinds' throughout time. I know this was meant to be a humorous comment, but I love to weave theories, and some of them even turn out to be descriptive of the nature of things.