Farewell, Geocities. You Shall Be Missed

Today is a sad day in internet history as the world will, at some point today, loose one of its prime hubs for poorly designed websites that were forgotten by their owners mere moments after they were created. For those that may be too young to fully understand the importance and impact of Geocities, let us take a trip all the way back to the year 2000, when sites and Geocities and Angelfire were all the rage, and web design mediocrity held sway.

Back before the internet had Blogger, Facebook, LiveJournal, WordPress, Twitter, and the myrid other sites where you can add your own personal slice of you to the already clogged information tubes, there was Geocities. Geocities was a simple to use web-based system that allowed you – the clueless internet user – to make your very own site from the ground up. It was never used for good. And that’s what was great about it. If, back in the day, you simply needed to find out a ton of information on N’Sync, a Geocities page was where you were inevitably linked to after a Lycos or AOL search. Or was N’Sync not your thing back in 1999-2000? Maybe you wanted some information on Stone Cold Steve Austin and his latest dealings with Vince McMahon? After a few typed keys you were magically transported to a webpage with a black background that had a single picture of Steve Austin flipping you off as a 10 second midi loop of his theme played and played until you muted the sound of your speakers. And, of course, who can forget the sparkley lettering that framed the entire page? Back in those primitive internet days (in the pre-Wikipedia era) when you wanted some shaky info on something or someone, a barren Geocities page was where you went. The chances of the page actually containing information that you gave a damn about were nearly non-existent, but damn it, you loved it all the same.

You see, back then, we didn’t need massive pages filled with information we were looking for. All we needed was a page that gave us well below the bare minimum required to be satisfied with our search results. Of course, we still hadn’t gotten over the fact that we were manipulating something on a screen, so, you know, we were easily impressed Neanderthals – Neanderthals with more access to Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan sites than we could have ever before dreamed.

But after today, all that will be gone. No longer will we be able to find the completely incorrect lyrics to songs by 98 degrees. No longer will our eyes be bombarded by gifs of flame when we happen across a Metallica fan site. No longer will we be able to find a site of some dude in Michigan who tiled his picture across the entirety of the page, which contains a single link in the center that leads to a 404 error. And, perhaps the saddest realization of all, we will no longer be able to visit Celine Dion fan pages that are less Celine Dion fan pages then they are epilepsy tests.

All of that is gone now.

Goodbye, Geocities. You shall be missed.