RIP Geocities

Geocities closes its doors for good today, after a long 15 years of providing budding webmasters a place to put up pictures of their cats. I have a special place in my heart for Geocities. It was there that I put up my very first website. I had many plans for "Osten Ard", as I called it back then. It was gonna have stuff about Star Trek, Star Wars, Fantasy, you name it. It was destined to be litheli place to go on the internet--despite the fact that everyone else had already done all that stuff before.

And then I rewatched a movie titled The Secret of NIMH, and tried typing it into AltaVista (remember that search engine?)... and, to cut a long story[=http://www.thornvalley.com/entr/intro.php]long story short, Thorn Valley was born, becoming litheli place to go on the internet. Well, for Secret of NIMH fans, anyway. :) Thorn Valley was first hosted at Geocities, but due to a large image archive of screen shots and a distaste for ads, it hopped around from one host to another, before finally ending up on its own server. Still, I have many fond memories of those times when I was first learning HTML and trying out this new-fangled E-mail thing (anyone remember Eudora?) and discovering friends online (some of whom are still good friends to this day). So, Geocities, I salute you. May the concept of free do-it-yourself web-hosting never die.

For my own tribute to Geocities, I've found my first website, preserved in all its glory on archive.org. Enjoy: http://web.archive.org/web/20021201061814/http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Labyrinth/4400/

That`s very interesting Simon, I never did visit your first website (now I have), I had no computer back then.
Thanks for staying with it till I finally got a computer and got on line to find fans like me.

I used to have a Geocities site for about 2 years, but then I deleted it. It's a shame Geocities closed though.

I have never made a website of my own, period. But I have come across several Geocities sites in my long treks across the internet. I really can't see why Yahoo did that and probably left many people without a way of making their own websites without learning any major computer skills.

Geocities: you will be missed.