and then rolls it right up
Wow. There goes a bit of history.
Aside from the incredibly rudimentary text-only pages and fingerfiles on my college’s Unix system (and one Santa Cruz geekhaus), my first real web sites were on Geocities. I helped out by volunteering as a community leader, I ran a few “groups”, and I had web rings (back when that particular entity was run by Sage Weil.) I left Geocities in 1998, shortly after Yahoo first partnered with Geocities and tried a stealth-rewrite of its Terms of Service. I stopped using Webring (or joining any webrings) when Geocities bought *that* in 1998. Still…it’s kind of sad to note the complete demise of Geocities.
I tried most of the first (1993-1996) free-webpage hosting services: Tripod. Angelfire. Xoom. I had a free graphics gallery, a database of support and recovery resources online, a primitive choose-your-own adventure game that was always more idea than actual game. (Trying to come up with, and keep track of, all those forking story ideas was a bit labor-intensive.)
I’ve since moved on quite a bit, running my own hosting business (minus any popup ads). But I still remember the Geocities culture, its general structure, its community. Geocities died a long time ago. Yahoo’s just been using the corpse to try and attract the occasional customer who decides to pay for premium service. (I’ve gotten a few of those clients who’ve found out that Yahoo’s idea of ‘premium’...isn’t very.)
Hearing this news is a bit like hearing that the playground you loved as a child…the playground you hadn’t thought about in a decade and hadn’t visited for a bit longer…is finally being demolished.
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