What Was Geocities?

Geocities was a web-hosting service that allowed people to create and publish their own personal sites for other people to view. It was founded in 1994, by David Bohnett and John Raznor. Geocities was briefly called Beverly Hills Internet (also briefly called Geopages), after the company that the two founded which was located in southern California, United States. The company offered people the ability to create and publish their own personal sites. The company also created its own internet directory, orignally named after infamous places in Los Angeles, California--which was later expanded to include more locations such as Yosemite, Paris, Tokyo and more! Each site created had to choose a "city" within the directory, which would become part of its url.

Geocities was later acquired by Yahoo! in 1999, prior to the collapse of the Dotcom Bubble. At the time of this acquisition, Geocities was the 3rd-most-visited site in the world. This decision was very unpopular and many users decided to leave the site due to the new terms of service enforced by Yahoo. Yahoo tried different routes to increase the revenue such as creating paid tiers of website hosting that offered more GB and faster data transfers, as well as creating a GeoCities Marketplace that shold Geocities merch which users could buy using GeoPoints. Despite Yahoo's attempts to turn Geocities into a profitable venture, it eventually led to it's shutdown in April 23rd, 2009 in the US. Yahoo would no longer allow the registration of new sites but registered sites were kept up until October 26th, 2099. Geocities in other countries may have been shut down on this date and kept running longer, such as Japanese Geocitites was functioning until 2019. Many projects, mirror-sites and competitors sprung up to fill the gap that Geocities was leaving and to archvie such an important part of internet culture.

The Impact Of Geocities

To many people, Geocities was their introduction, as well as the symbol, of the free internet. Rupert Goodwins, the editor of ZDNet, he described GeoCities as "the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet." Part of what made Geocities so popular and loved was the creation of neighborhoods and the warm atmosphere that surrounded the managment of these neighborhoods. Neighborhoods were not created specifically for certain interests in mind, and were reported to not police user's contents to match the neighborhood theme. Geocities' users called sites "homesteads" as they were building out a home on the unruled, unregulated internet. Neighboorhoods could only have up to 9000 members, so "suburbs" were created to further expand. A suburb was a subsection of the neighborhood like ex: the Orchestra suburb in the Broadway neighborhood. Each suburb could have 9000 members. Part of what Geocities so special was that there were self-appointed Community Leaders (CLs) that would welcome new members, help them with setting up their homestead and help run the neighborhood. When Yahoo took over Geocities, they made the Neighborhoods and Suburbs theme defunct, which may be another reason homesteaders left the site.

Where To Visit The Remains of This Great Giant

There were a myraid of attempts to archive Geocities sites, however not all of them have effectively survived to this date. Here are a list of sites where you can either browse images of archived Geocities sites or scour more directly through archived directories. Please note that many of the links that may be linked to the resources listed here may be defunct.

Cameron's World

The Geocities Gallery

Blade's Place

One Terabyte of Kilobyteage

Oocities

Creator's Notes

This page was made to model after Geocities sites of yore! That's why the design of this page is quite simplistic and a little bit jarring with the fonts, background and graphics. Hopefully, not too eye-straining but enough to call back to the bright, bold designs of old Geocities sites. I tried to do something reminiscent of the common use of iframe side borders, which I tried to recreate it using CSS. I chose a pink Hello Kitty-esque theme based off your site's index theme of pink and yellow Pompurin. I tried to find Pompurin gifs and grpahics, but I couldn't find any :( I hope you enjoy this little gift from me. I apologize for delivering your gift so late, I had ended up being very busy with school this semester and forgot about this (Neocities in generall really).

CSS Code

(you could probably incoporate the css into the html, i just couldn't figure out how)

HTML Code

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="super_secret.css" type="text/css">
    <title>Avelos's Secret Santa Shrine</title>
    <style>

body{
      background-image: url('https://drinkmoretea.neocities.org/super%20secret/hearts%203.gif');
    }
    
    p {
  font-size: 15px;
  color: #450920;
}

h1 {
    font-size: 20px;
    color: #a53860;
}

h2 {
    font-size: 18px;
    color: #CC498F;
}

h3 {
    font-size: 16px;
    color: #ED2D87;
}

ul {
  font-size: 15px;
  color: #F52083;
}

a {
  font-size: 15px;
  color: #F00C49; }

@font-face {
  font-family: myFont;
  src: url(Goodlist.otf);
}

* {
   font-family: myFont;
}
    </style>
<section class="layout">
  <div class="sidebar"></div>
  <div class="body">
  <br><br>
  <center><a href="https://picasion.com/gl/l8uF/"><img src="https://i.picasion.com/gl/93/l8uF.gif" width="650" height="79" border="0" alt="https://picasion.com/gl/l8uF/" /></a><a href="https://picasion.com/gl/l8uF/"><img src="https://drinkmoretea.neocities.org/super%20secret/hello%20kitty%2051.gif" ></a></center>
  <br><br>

<h1><img src="https://drinkmoretea.neocities.org/super%20secret/butterflies%20237.gif" align=left height=100px width=100px>What Was Geocities?</h1>
<p>Geocities was a web-hosting service that allowed people to create and publish their own personal sites for other people to view. It was founded in 1994, by David Bohnett and John Raznor. Geocities was briefly called Beverly Hills Internet (also briefly called Geopages), after the company that the two founded which was located in southern California, United States. The company offered people the ability to create and publish their own personal sites. The company also created its own internet directory, orignally named after infamous places in Los Angeles, California--which was later expanded to include more locations such as Yosemite, Paris, Tokyo and more! Each site created had to choose a "city" within the directory, which would become part of its url.</p>

<p><img src="https://drinkmoretea.neocities.org/super%20secret/hello%20kitty%2031.gif" align=right height=100px width=100px>Geocities was later acquired by Yahoo! in 1999, prior to the collapse of the Dotcom Bubble. At the time of this acquisition, Geocities was the 3rd-most-visited site in the world. This decision was very unpopular and many users decided to leave the site due to the new terms of service enforced by Yahoo. Yahoo tried different routes to  increase the revenue such as creating paid tiers of website hosting that offered more GB and faster data transfers, as well as creating a GeoCities Marketplace that shold Geocities merch which users could buy using GeoPoints. Despite Yahoo's attempts to turn Geocities into a profitable venture, it eventually led to it's shutdown in April 23rd, 2009 in the US. Yahoo would no longer allow the registration of new sites but registered sites were kept up until October 26th, 2099. Geocities in other countries may have been shut down on this date and kept running longer, such as Japanese Geocitites was functioning until 2019. Many projects, mirror-sites and competitors sprung up to fill the gap that Geocities was leaving and to archvie such an important part of internet culture. </p>

<h1>The Impact Of Geocities</h1>

<p><img src="https://drinkmoretea.neocities.org/super%20secret/hello%20kitty%2063.gif" align=left height=100px width=100px>To many people, Geocities was their introduction, as well as the symbol, of the free internet. Rupert Goodwins, the editor of ZDNet, he described GeoCities as "the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet." Part of what made Geocities so popular and loved was the creation of neighborhoods and the warm atmosphere that surrounded the managment of these neighborhoods. Neighborhoods were not created specifically for certain interests in mind, and were reported to not police user's contents to match the neighborhood theme. Geocities' users called sites "homesteads" as they were building out a home on the unruled, unregulated internet. Neighboorhoods could only have up to 9000 members, so "suburbs" were created to further expand. A suburb was a subsection of the neighborhood like ex: the Orchestra suburb in the Broadway neighborhood. Each suburb could have 9000 members. Part of what Geocities so special was that there were self-appointed Community Leaders (CLs) that would welcome new members, help them with setting up their homestead and help run the neighborhood. When Yahoo took over Geocities, they made the Neighborhoods and Suburbs theme defunct, which may be another reason homesteaders left the site.</p>

<h1>Where To Visit The Remains of This Great Giant</h1>

<p><img src="https://drinkmoretea.neocities.org/super%20secret/cat%20677.gif" align=right>There were a myraid of attempts to archive Geocities sites, however not all of them have effectively survived to this date. Here are a list of sites where you can either browse images of archived Geocities sites or scour more directly through archived directories. Please note that many of the links that may be linked to the resources listed here may be defunct.<p>

<ul><a href="https://www.cameronsworld.net/">Cameron's World</a> is a web-collage of text and images excavated from the buried neighbourhoods of archived GeoCities pages (1994–2009). A great visualization of Internet style design of old!</ul>

<ul><a href="https://geocities.restorativland.org/">The Geocities Gallery</a> is a restoritivland project, where you can browse image stills of Geocities sorted by neighborhood.</ul>

<ul><a href="https://www.bladesplace.id.au/geocities-neighborhoods-suburbs.html">Blade's Place</a> explains Geocities neighboorhoods more thoroughly, as well as listing a directory of all the neighborhoods with their suburbs.</ul>

<ul><a href="https://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/">One Terabyte of Kilobyteage</a> is a tumblr site that posts images of Geocities sites that were captured by the Internet Archive's team. To my understanding, there must be a way to access the data that they captured but so far I have only been able to find dead links to it.</ul>

<ul><a href="https://www.oocities.org/#gsc.tab=0">Oocities</a> is the most extensive archival site that I have found yet with, stills of all, or at least a lot, userIDs of each neighborhood and suburb. It does take a bit to load though.</ul>

<h3>Creator's Notes</h3>
<p>This page was made to model after Geocities sites of yore! That's why the design of this page is quite simplistic and a little bit jarring with the fonts, background and graphics. Hopefully, not too eye-straining but enough to call back to the bright, bold designs of old Geocities sites. I tried to do something reminiscent of the common use of iframe side borders, which I tried to recreate it using CSS. I chose a pink Hello Kitty-esque theme based off your site's index theme of pink and yellow Pompurin. I tried to find Pompurin gifs and grpahics, but I couldn't find any :(   I hope you enjoy this little gift from me. I apologize for delivering your gift so late, I had ended up being very busy with school this semester and  forgot about this (Neocities in generall really). </p>

<p>All graphics used on this site came from <a href="https://bettysgraphics.neocities.org/">Betty's Graphics</a>, the custom font is <a href="https://www.dafont.com/goodlist.font">Goodlist from dafont.com</a>, and the glittery logo comes from <a href="https://picasion.com/glitter-maker/">Picasion</a>.

</center>
</div>
</section>

All graphics used on this site came from Betty's Graphics, the custom font is Goodlist from dafont.com, and the glittery logo comes from Picasion.