On Memoriam of Geocities
Today XKCD redesigned their website to commemorate Geocities, the once popular free site hosting.
Wow, the counter, the blink-blink, the marquee, and the tables resembled so much back in the days. I admit, it was cool to have that look back then. The visitor page/guest book was the common cool feature! It’s the only way that visitors may leaved messages to the site author. Oh, btw, my page was in area51.
There were Lycos, Angelfire, etc. but back then only Geocities provided its service without putting excessive ad. It only had a Geocities bar that can be retracted. Unfortunately, I stopped using Geocities when the first attack wave to Yahoo! and its services surfaced years ago. Someone pissed me so much with defacing my site. It’s not a big deal if the person able to do so, twas common bug that script kiddies could do, but the words that the person put on my old site did struck my heart.
Now, we have modern blog and social media sites everywhere. Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) rocked our world with many fine quality products that made every implementation could be achieved in decent cost. Still, Geocities left a great value to our Internet community. It showed us that a free service can be provided and maintained. Plus, the power of community enhanced the content. The only problem of it, it was lack of evolution. So, just like Friendster, it has its day and we all thankful for that.
thank you geocities, I won’t forget you