Feliz Naviblah, Everybody!
Tonight, Yahoo! will shut down Geocities, the free webhosting service that was a mainstay in many of our early internet adventures. It's sad—particularly for Yahoo!, since they paid $3.9 billion in stock for it ten years ago—but the good news is that there's still time to save your old fanfiction from dotcom obscurity.
Geocities has existed for as long as I can remember the internet, providing free themed "neighborhood" space to users starting in 1995 and encouraging us to become technological "homesteaders." It was a forerunner of blogs and social networking sites, bringing like-minded people together via link directories and webrings. At a very young age, and with a very slow modem, Geocities helped me make homepages and fan pages. It had me mucking around with HTML and its own creaky site-building tools. I was 13 years old, so it was the host of my anti-Dawson's Creek screed, Dawson's Creak, and later it made room for too many trashy stories—the kind where Mulder and Scully really, really like each other or Harry Potter's broomstick needs tweaking. But it was the first way I learned to publish myself on the web.
Its dawn-of-the-internet aesthetic—buzzy backgrounds, rainbow text, neon pagecounters, misaligned tables and ever-present "under construction" icons—have become a staple of web history and nostalgia. But beyond teenage shrines and the garish experimental HTML pages of old, Geocities has deep roots in user-driven creativity. There are innumerable fansites, self-published fiction, fanfiction archives, art galleries and group pages among the countless housed at Geocities.
While active sites may move their content, many of us have left behind Geocities graveyards stuffed full of old things, trusting them to always be there. But now the internet is failing us. It's time to take action and save your ninth-grade fanfiction before it is gone forever.
Yahoo! recommends visiting your Geocities page, right/ctrl clicking it, and saving the file that way. You can also login to your Geocities account, if you can remember it, at
Many online fannish communities will be dealt a blow when Geocities goes down for good. The idea of all the lost fiction, art, and man-hours lovingly given over towards advancing a particular genre obsession is bracing. It is a tragic day for the interwebs. So while you're taking the time to preserve your own content, take a moment to save some of the stuff you've loved in the past, too.
Although the nonprofit Internet Archive is doing its best to compile Geocities pages, it is nowhere near comprehensive. Stories by long-gone authors, carefully collected recommendation pages, lengthy manifestos and original art could vanish entirely into the ether today. Let's save what we can—the future will thank us. And they won't even have to scroll past multicolor backdrops and madly blinking graphics, more's the pity.
Kaila Hale-Stern lives in a self-selected corner of the internet populated by basement-dwelling anarchists and people who write stories about their favorite fictional characters. Her primary concerns are the duplicities of history, the scourge of pop culture, and not letting Mayor Bloomberg win the battle against cigarettes. She can be read here and reached here.
"weight loss success story"
Alas, FRAMESET, you had such potential before the hooker. Wait, that’s Spitzer.
10/26/09 Reply‘Like a Shepherd’
Little known Madonna B Side.
10/26/09 ReplyWait, is this Intern Kaila? I want some charts too! From Intern Mary!
OMG you know what is so awesome? They were intern-ettes. DO YOU GET IT??
10/26/09 ReplyAw, you remembered. You even punned! I could plotz.
10/26/09 ReplyKaila has come to my house before. I WIN.
(It made me so happy to see this byline! Woot!)
10/26/09 ReplyI would like to a GeoCities site that I built a while ago, and of which I was proud for a while. But I will not be responsible for an extended plague of photo-sensitive epilepsy.
10/26/09 Replyohhhhh, i love choose your own verb. my money’s on “eructate”.
10/26/09 ReplyWhere will I find the creepy Peter Pan guy now?!?!
10/26/09 ReplyAND the “I Liek Milk!!” guy. Aw, I’m feeling nostalgic.
10/26/09 ReplyAlso: A group at archiveteam.org is, and has been for a while, trying to download and archive as much of geocities as possible. (I believe they’ve gotten up to a terabyte downloaded.)
10/26/09 ReplyAND IT’S ALL CENTERED.
10/26/09 Reply“Its dawn-of-the-internet aesthetic—buzzy backgrounds, rainbow text, neon pagecounters, misaligned tables and ever-present ‘under construction’ icons—have become a staple of web history and nostalgia.”
At least we can take solace in the fact that M.I.A. is still making the most of that epilepsy-inducing aesthetic. And countless MySpaces.
10/26/09 ReplyTEAM ANGELFIRE, KALIA!!
10/26/09 ReplyOh man. I just put to bed a 60-page Answer Book about a town in Connecticut and definitely listed some Geocities pages as the homepages of the Kiwanis club and local boating clubs and stuff like that. Went to the printer on Friday. Appearing as a supplement this Thursday. Sweet.
10/26/09 ReplyIs it my imagination, or does the CNN story about Geocities borrow heavily from this post?
10/27/09 ReplyAlas, My Travis McGee fan page is never to updated again. Not that it had been since 1996.
10/27/09 Replycorrection: adam lambert’s cover art is the very last geocities fan page http://tinyurl.com/yz9q2hr
10/27/09 Reply