Slashdot Log In
Archive Team Is Busy Saving Geocities
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Apr 27, 2009 06:50 PM
from the one-might-well-ask-why dept.
from the one-might-well-ask-why dept.
jamie found this note from Jason Scott, who organizes the Archive Team. They are busy downloading as much of Geocities as they can before it vanishes from the Net after Yahoo pulled the plug. (Note: that textfiles.com link is a good candidate for Readability.) "..after 48 hours of work, Archive Team has saved over 200,000 Geocities sites. We're now pulling in new sites at the rate of something like 5 a second. Is that fast enough? We'll see, won't we. ... A side-effect of the whole process is I now know way, way, way too much [sic] about Geocities than I ever expected to. We've had to dissect every aspect of how the site functions to understand how to mirror things, from its history through how it does crazy javascript ads. Some of it is stupid and some is hilarious... We think we have most every site from 1999 and before on Geocities that was left. ... It is more important to me to grab the data than to figure out how to serve it later. People who have been talking about copyright and stuff seem to think I'm going to sell it or take credit or some crap. I don't see how the final collection won't end up online, but how is elusive — maybe a torrent of a bunch of zip files, or as a curated collection, or as a bunch of hard drives. However it is, I'll make sure people can get it, somehow."
Related Stories
[+]
Yahoo Pulls the Plug On GeoCities 427 comments
Mike writes "It's official: Yahoo is pulling the plug, and GeoCities is dead. GeoCities had suffered a long and drawn-out battle with its health over the past decade. An antiquated service model and outdated technology are widely blamed for the struggle. An official cause of death, however, has yet to be determined. Awful, eye-punishing graphics, lack of relevancy, and 'lowest-common-denominator design' are believed to have contributed to its demise. GeoCities was 15 years old." There is doubtless a lot of funny and informative stuff on there that's worth saving (not just Jesux, which pudge has now migrated). If some of it belongs to you, perhaps you should move it sometime in the next few months. Update: 04/24 18:10 GMT by T : And if you know some GeoCities page owners who aren't especially computer savvy, you could point out to them how easy it is to slurp down their pages for re-hosting elsewhere.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Don't forget (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Don't forget (Score:4, Informative)
firefox still supports the blink :D
Parent
Re:Don't forget (Score:5, Informative)
Until I found about:config, browser.blink_allowed.
Parent
How long until someone's saving Youtube videos? (Score:4, Insightful)
With Google losing half a billion a year, how long until they pull the plug on Youtube? I guess it could turn a profit, but when? My guess is the next downturn will cause shareholder pressure to force their hand.
At that rate... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They'll be broke in only 40 years.
I wonder if you were thinking the same thing I was when you said this.
There is a part in Citizen Kane where his editor is telling Kane as a publisher 'your losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month' or words to that effect and Kane says 'your right, at that rate I'll have to close the doors in 20 years' or there abouts.
I am too lazy to login or google the exact quote.
Re:At that rate... (Score:5, Informative)
"You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in sixty years."
Parent
Re:At that rate... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because of course, we know they'll never adapt, they'll never innovate, right?
I mean, it's only Google. It's not like there's any smart people involved. What have they ever done?
Sometimes, I tire of intellectual midgets.
Parent
WOOOOOOOOSHHH!!!! (Score:3, Funny)
n/t
Re:At that rate... (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, 40 years ago businesses with rare exception didn't have computers. There was no Internet. It took a professional typist about 10 minutes to bang out a professional letter. There were no cellular phones - hell, touch-tone wouldn't even be invented for fifteen years.
I've got more transistors in my house than existed then in all the world. I've got more storage in my desktop computer (3TB) than existed in the world at that time. I can communicate in ways that at that time were absurd speculative fiction, and would have seemed absurdly undesirable. For example, an annoying computer sends an email reminder every night at midnight to my cellular phone and I can't convince its administrator to make it stop. I could turn my cell phone into a streaming web beacon that updates my position on a world-visible map in real time and I don't actually know if it's doing that without my permission. I can stream my live first person perspective to everyone in the world bored enough to watch it. And now it takes a team of 3 most of a day to craft and deliver a professional email.
You're right. By then we may have lost the ability to communicate in the written form entirely, and lost the option to opt out. That would definitely be "more change".
Parent
Re:How long until someone's saving Youtube videos? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're missing one important point:
How much would Google be losing to competition if they didn't have Youtube?
It's a war out there, and Youtube is an outpost - costly to keep, but if you don't keep it, the enemy will gain not only it but a lot of field.
Parent
I lost my geocities page password 10 years ago... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I lost my geocities page password 10 years ago. (Score:5, Funny)
Did you try hunter2?
Parent
Re:I lost my geocities page password 10 years ago. (Score:5, Funny)
What was that password? When you typed hunter2, all I saw was *******.
Parent
Re:I lost my geocities page password 10 years ago. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Funny, but true. I did forget my login information (email/username and password) to this site [geocities.com], which is just the one image.
For those who don't know, this is a parody of Chick religious tracts [chick.com] (God, what a waste of a domain name!) that has often been the target of the Chick lawyers [howardhallis.com].
Note to the Chick legal team: I'll be glad to take it down if you give me my password! :)
And nothing of value was archived (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And nothing of value was archived (Score:4, Interesting)
I think some Yahoo suits thinking exactly as you joked but a message for them: It is history they will be rm -rf 'ing and you show like a company which can't even afford idle webpages hosting for historical purposes, in such a bad shape with no future.
They will be deleting (or considering even) dead/passed away people's webpages while they don't have any chance to reply to their lame mails or "click here" things. They did the very same thing in Yahoo Briefcase, 10 MB of highly compressible data for God's sake. At most!
Parent
Re:And nothing of value was archived (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a time, I'd put it somewhere between 1996 and 1998, when Geocities wasn't half bad. Few people were really "up" on the technology, so they'd use Geocities to host real, actual pages that didn't suck. Granted it didn't last very long, and practically overnight everybody was using real hosting options for anything serious. But for a little while, seeing search engine return a link to Geocities wasn't automatically a bad thing.
Then again, maybe there just wasn't much to compare to back then. Or maybe it just seemed neat because I was only 14.
Parent
Re:And nothing of value was archived (Score:5, Funny)
Or maybe it just seemed neat because I was only 14.
Thanks for making me feel like an old man.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Can you give us an example?
I'm not doubting that there's something culturally crucial that's on a Geocities page somewhere that's never been moved elsewhere, but I'd like an example before I get too exercised.
Re:And nothing of value was archived (Score:5, Informative)
Uh. We already have repeated it. Myspace is basically last couple of years' geocities.
Now there's the web 2.0 boom which is the geocities of the future. Except, instead of small personals sites with blinking gif animations, you have big sites with horrible AJAX interfaces that completely breaks page navigation. Yes, this applies to big websites like slashdot and freshmeat as well.
What the hell? What was wrong with the old slashcode? The difference for the end user is that now you have to click 10 times to do what you could do in one click in the web 1.0 version.
The lesson to be learn is that you shouldn't fix what isn't broken.
Now I'll get back to my rocking chair. I've got kids to keep off the lawn.
Parent
Re:And nothing of value was archived (Score:5, Interesting)
That would eliminate a whole lot of what we call "progress" in technology and culture.
Sometimes, you don't realize something is "broken" until somebody comes along and "fixes" it.
Know what? I like people who fix what isn't broken.
Parent
Re:And nothing of value was archived (Score:5, Insightful)
That would eliminate a whole lot of what we call "progress" in technology and culture.
Sometimes, you don't realize something is "broken" until somebody comes along and "fixes" it.
Know what? I like people who fix what isn't broken.
Though aimlessly adopting any new technology that comes along isn't progress.
I'm appending a list of browser features mutilated by web 2.0:
When every webpage has it's own conventions for what happens when you press a key, you haven't moved forward, you've moved into chaos. Nowadays, what happens when you press a key or click on an element is an entirely arbitrary matter in the hands of the website designer, and completely different from site to site.
Navigating webpages used to be difficult enough when all links were immediately available. Now, adding to the pain, you have to search page elements that are only loaded if you perform some arcane voodoo ritual that the designer figured decided was how the page elements should work.
It's not that web 2.0 pages have a new interface that's different from the old, it's that every single web 2.0 page has it's own conventions.
Parent
Re:And nothing of value was archived (Score:5, Funny)
Except for the fact that the girls are younger and sluttier, a definitive improvement.
Parent
Re:And nothing of value was archived (Score:4, Insightful)
The new Slashdot interface is better than the old, all in all. The preferences popup/overlay is stupid and the moderating interface needs to go back to having a confirm moderation button but the dynamic display of remaining mod points is nice and the inline, dynamic commenting is brilliant. The ajax-driven thread expand/collapse is also good.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I humbly disagree that Myspace is anywhere near as useful as Geocities could be*. Or at least entertaining.
You could spend hours on interesting geocities sites devoted to a very particular subject. Anyone remember the website "Spatula City"? I think it was hosted on geocities for a time.
Then you had the websites that were kind of like mini-wikipedias for tv shows, Star Trek, the simpsons, and so on.
There was the odd personal webpage that was actually interesting (I remember "Tales from a loser" or something
Re:Oh God (Score:4, Funny)
If anything s mentioned in the same sentence as goatse it's quite safe to assume that it probably doesn't involve puppy dogs and kittens, at least not in the traditional sense.
Parent
We should not let this happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't anybody going to move a finger, while a significant part of our collective history disappears forever?
I really don't think anyone should be allowed to simply pull the plug, no matter what TOS say.
If I buy the Colosseum and then decide to blow it up "because it's mine", I bet I'd be stopped by someone, rightly so.
As a historian of year 2075, I'd really want to have access to Geocities if I am researching the '90s.
It happened at least once before. In the 50's and early 60's, video storage technology was expensive, and most video documentation was not not considered to be of any 'historical value'. As a result, most of it was just erased and we have lost forever an incredible source of information on that period.
Is there a productive way to scream? A petition of some kind? An attorney to be addressed?
Re:We should not let this happen. (Score:4, Funny)
If you buy a movie theater that shows dirty porn films and has jerk-off booths in the back, people will be demanding you blow it up for years, and when you do, they'll throw a party.
Parent
Re:We should not let this happen. (Score:4, Insightful)
... but you don't want to burn the only existing master of such porn films.
(Seriously, believe it or not, early porn movies of the 20's are a prized source of historical documentation. And with good reason: they tell a lot about their time.)
Parent
Re:We should not let this happen. (Score:5, Funny)
And archived porn from the 2000s will tell future generations that the sexual act in our time always ended with the man ejaculating up the woman's nose.
They'll wonder how anybody ever got pregnant around the turn of the millennium.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, everyone that originally had sites on Geocities should have already been responsible for the content they left there. If it was actually important then they should already have moved
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't anybody going to move a finger, while a significant part of our collective history disappears forever?
Yes, the Archive guys are lifting their finger 5 times every second and archiving them.
Don't make me say that RTF thing.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Petitioning Yahoo to continue hosting an antiquated service that is likely bleeding money isn't likely to be productive, obviously.
But it would be awfully nice of them to .tar everything up and .torrent it. There are thousands of us who'd be more than happy to do our part to keep those bits from disappearing into the ether.
Shame on Yahoo (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just ridiculous the amount of work they have to go through to half ass archive geocities. Why can't yahoo just hand over a stack of hard drives to archive.org or someone?
Who do I bribe? (Score:5, Funny)
I want to make sure that any geocities site I may have been affiliated with back in my formative years is not seen by anyone who might recognize me now.
Who do I make the check out to, and how many significant places will be required?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It might already be gone. I, too, once had a page on GeoCities, so I decided to look into it. Searching for it, Google couldn't find it (but it seems Google Books likes to interpret the old long s as an f). Fine tuning my search pulled up one hit: a Usenet post with a link to the page in the .sig. So, I take this, and I go to the wayback machine. Put in the URL, and I get two versions, both from the year 2000 (well after I had stopped updating the site). Clicking the links, both were unavailable. The conten
And how many of them will find other hosting? (Score:4, Interesting)
And just because someone asked, I saved all ~300 of my Youtube favorites to my HDD last weekend, when I realized how much I rely on them for my own hobby research projects, teaching classes, etc. Most of it was stuff that will never be on DVD. Some of it is stuff that the owners have *already* deleted in the last week, due to perfectionism or whatever.
I was a Boy Scout, and relying on some free service without thinking of contingencies just doesn't make sense.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
>I was a Boy Scout, and relying on some free service without thinking of contingencies just doesn't make sense.
Sounds kind of like the argument against Web Apps ...
Did anyone else pronounce 'geocities'... (Score:5, Funny)
...to rhyme with 'atrocities' ?
Thank god that somebody is archiving it (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that our generation will leave less of a mark than that which came before it because nobody is writing on paper. Geocities is the closest thing that we have to shoe-boxes full of letters and diaries for the period spanning the late 90's (In the form of websites about star trek and software and pointless articles posted by ambitious young proto-webdesigners). In the future, there will be a similar scramble to preserve facebook and myspace to preserve correspondence for future generations.
angelfire's open directories (Score:3, Interesting)
Angelfire was fun to snoop around on, since the image subdirectories were open for the browsing. Sometimes you found images not meant for the public.
To those who say Geocities has nothing of value... (Score:4, Informative)
Here is just one example of content on Geocities that has value.
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/8682/ [geocities.com]
These old documents are still of value to people modding the old games.
Good lord let it go (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
with that site gone, how will people ever know that soy beverages, soy cheese, soy flour, soy meal, soy oil, soy sauce, soy protein, and soybeans ALL CONTAIN SOY PRODUCTS?
i know it's not all of them, but seriously - damn near half of the products on that page have SOY in the name. i can only deduce that geocities hates natural selection.
Re:A lesson for future generations (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
>internet wayback machine
who do you think archive.org is?
And google cache is strictly short term.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Come on now, http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/Bay/5707/index.html [geocities.com] is not all that bad. Sure, the blue background makes my eyes bleed in pain in an attempt to read the text, and the drivers license picture included is painful to look at, but overall it is not bad.