Geocities Closing
12 years ago in July of 1997 on a boring summer afternoon Jon and I got the idea to create a website. Years before blogs, facebook, myspace, youtube, and even friendster we wanted a presence on the internet. A place to share our thoughts, jokes, stories, movie reviews, pictures, and videos.
And now all that is coming to an end.
To hell with that.
Yes the website had gone to seed like a once regularly tended garden, growing in every direction and much of it was dated and no longer relevant but it never stopped being a resource.
Of course nothing on the internet is ever truly, completely gone - The Way Back Machine chronicles every dumbass mistake you’ve ever made on the web. That’s both comforting and disturbing.
With one stress-relieving passtime having recently gotten the crap kicked out of it this major project isn’t entirely unwelcome. Given all the hours I’ve put into the site over the years it didn’t seem right to be so embarrassed by much of it. Seems to be a theme lately: facing projects that at the time seemed fun and worthwhile but in the end were mostly wastes of time.
But unlike imaginary vacations (how stupid does that sound?) I think there’s something good that can be salvaged here.
First I need to find a new home for the site. Yahoo! hasn’t yet announced when exactly they’ll be shutting Geocities down but the initial release kept mentioning this summer as when more definitive information would be forthcoming. I’m often ve y busy in the summer so I want to get out in front of this thing. I don’t want to wake up one day and find my website gone.
So the first step would seem to be trimming the crap…and there’s a lot to trim. Some pages that have been around since the beginning that are now little more than irritating e-mail forwards.
I think some pages worth keeping include: novel reviews, the story of my username, my convocation, some writing, the roadtrips section, and a few others. Things I have already removed include: half of the comedy section, the music section, the guestbook, Dark Enigma’s page, some extreneous DS9 pages, the story of AllAdvantage, Hiking and Karaoke pictures, and a bunch of other crap.
