If anybody noticed, Yahoo! Geocities officially closes today for good. But, for the geeks that recall being on the Internet prior to 2000, a piece of history was lost today. To pay tribute to what was the first web host for many of us, several popular website have paid tribute and provided archives for the Geocities pages lost today.

Oh, and we provide a tribute and archive of our own, too!

Skip to a particular section:
Tributes
Archives
Personal Notes

The Tributes

First, the tributes: these have been seen and collected from all around the Internet, paying homage to the loss of many poorly-made, if not historic, Geocities pages sure to be lost with the service’s closing:

• xkcd.com’s Geocities redesign – we are mirroring it here, just in case the “redesign” is lost in the future.
• WELCOME TO YOUR DOOM!!! – also mirrored in case of a future unavailability, this person almost perfectly represents every other Geocities page in existence.
• Another Perfect Geocities Tribute – a great read for any person reminiscent of Geocities, as well.
• The GIF Guy’s Website (image map-less mirror here) – this site, hosted on a bare IP, is the archive of the Geocities page of the guy who created the first famous “under construction” GIF. Source is here.
• Geocities “Under Construction” Animated GIFs Collection – a memory-intensive archive of almost every “under construction” animated GIF known to mankind!

Those are classic, I really enjoyed how they satirize the “poor” usage of HTML/frames/GIFs as the old Geocities sites used to. Of course, if you want to experience this same feeling on a modern website, just jump on over to MySpace where most profiles continue to do so only with some CSS thrown in the mix.

(or, read my complaint against MySpace – the same applies to Geocities, as well

The Archives

The main archivers of Geocities are The Archive Team and Archive.org, both of whom realize that the shutdown of Geocities could potentially be a loss of valuable information.

In addition to these (but certainly not outshining them), there are a few Geocities pages a few editors here have saved during private web browsing, mainly saved due to the fact that Geocities has been rumored to have been closing for some time. There are pretty off-the-wall, just to warn you:

• RKFS Linux Filesystem Tutorial – archive of a Geocities-hosted Linux filesystem driver tutorial.
• Cold Water Extraction Tutorial – a chemical procedure detailing how to extract a liver-harming chemical from certain medicines.

The 404 error in the right frame of the page is due to the missing ad page that Geocities began to stick into pages – disregard it.

Final Notes

While Geocities is regarded by most early Internet-goers as a collection of poorly constructed (yet always “under construction”), personal, random, and terrible excuses for websites, there are a few Geocities sites that actually contain useful information, as the various archiving teams set out to preserve in history.

If you were a heavy Internet user from 1994 – 2000 or beyond, then you may have just had a Geocities page as your first website, so don’t be so fast to ridicule those who did. As for the rest of us, a simple MySpace/Facebook/Twitter/$SOCIAL_MEDIA website will suffice in the absence of Geocities.

R.I.P. Geocities 1995 – 2009