Yahoo Pulls the Plug On GeoCities 427
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 An antiquated service model and outdated technology are widely blamed for the struggle.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.
Re:RIP (Score:4, Informative)
This [geocities.com] was in my browser history.
Bit outdated, but indicative of the fact that useful stuff resides on geocities.
Oh, just remembered zx32 [geocities.com] which I used to use back in my Windows days.
Re:Anyone have a suggestion where to go next? (Score:4, Informative)
Free? As in beer? What do you want, another Geocities?
Try Dreamhost. Not free, but totally not-sucky for the price, IMHO. Includes a Linux shell, if you're into that sort of thing, and a fair bit of space that you can use for backups of your own files.
Been with them for years; still getting used to the whole "buy now, we bill you, and then you pay your bill sometime later" philosophy, which seems to be totally lacking in this field.
(Note to mods: I'd be spamming if I posted a referral link to Dreamhost. I, however, did no such thing.)
Re:RIP (Score:5, Informative)
Geocities had a lot of content. A huge amount of useful information. Especially the pre-Yahoo stuff.
Yes. For example websites devoted to the internals of GW-Basic. I don't write new programs in it, but I still convert old programs written in it. Also, the early versions of G77 for Windows are there plus documentation plus collections of compiled libraries.
A bigger bite is for those of us whose ISPs were the baby Bells. I still have an old web page that is essentially prodigy. 15 MB limit, one level, browser based updating and file creation, but it's ad free and still there. More recent customers found their personal web pages are hosted on Geocities, complete with their icky ad overlays.
Yahoo managed to crap up the e-mail side too, when they migrated their customers to "Yahoo mail". I pay for e-mail as part of my internet access. If I want to read e-mail on the web, it comes with ads.
So I'm not entirely sorry that Geocities is going away. And as bad as AT&T and Yahoo are, both are far better than the local cable company.
Re:Anyone have a suggestion where to go next? (Score:4, Informative)
nearlyfreespeech.net [nearlyfreespeech.net]. It's not free, but it costs only pennies and you don't have to endure any garbage. You get CGI in all sorts of nice functional languages, shell script access, and nice tools.
Re:Anyone have a suggestion where to go next? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:RIP (Score:3, Informative)
Earthlink? AOL? "...the late '90s"? Where the fuck were you in 1990 when I was downloading pr0n from a Usenet dialup BBS? Huh?
According to Wikipedia, fount of all human knowledge, GeoCities was created in late 1994, so what you may have been doing in 1990 has no bearing on this discussion.
Re:It hurts me inside (Score:3, Informative)
Ah, but do you remember AltaVista before they bought the altavista.com domain name? It used to be altavista.digital.com! Of course DEC became Compaq which became HP, and as others have corrected you, Yahoo! now owns AltaVista.
Re:Anyone have a suggestion where to go next? (Score:1, Informative)
It looks like DreamHost is offering two years of their hosting free to GeoCities users:
http://blog.dreamhost.com/2009/04/24/theyre-internet-history/
There's an interesting story about the history of WebRing there too.
Re:Advertisement (Score:2, Informative)
That was actually a fun arms race I can recall. First it started with noscript, but then they started closing noscript tag if found - for at least a month you could do noscript twice and it still blocked the popup. You could also put <!-- at the end for a while too. Eventually you ended up putting all sorts of crazy garbage at the end in an attempt to break the popup window while geocities would try to figure out how to unbreak it, but most people had long given up before that.