Under a Gibbous Moon

The first page I ever put up on the internet was way back in 1996 courtesy of Geocities. It was mostly a fan site for my favorite RPGs and books at the time and hosted such content as would put my on the business end of a law suit today (ahhh… simpler times)

At the time, they were the go to source for free internet web hosting. I think every single person on the internet at that time had a site there. Because of this, it quickly became known for hosting some of the most eye meltingly bad web designs ever seen by man. A friend of mine had a web page that had so many animated gifs on it (It was a Daggerfall fan page with images of all the sprite rendered monsters) that it took some ten minutes to load over a 14.4 modem connection. Another friend had zero organization to his HTML code and it was only by the grace of IE 4 lack of adherence to standards that the page rendered at all.

I had not thought of Geocities in years nor of its fate until today on the sublime web comic XKCD.

XKCD's Geocities tribute redesign

I have no idea how long he plans on leaving the web site like this, but it truly captures everything that was great and terrible about Geocities.

Related (maybe) posts:

1. Geocitifiy your page!
2. The Internet will never amount to anything, a retrospective
3. An Ode to Blog Spam (Fuck You)
4. Waterloo has met its waterloo
5. A simple solution to online newspaper advertising