Under a Gibbous Moon

It’s been almost a year since Geocities went dark. Now, for all of you who miss that tacky goodness, you can convert the web page of your choice into the artistic meme that was Geocities.

Here’s mine.

WARNING: May Be Hazardous to Vision and/or Sanity

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.