Geocities is closing.

In the event anyone has their SL site on Geocities, Geocities will be shutting down.

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/geocities-05.html

http://www.pcworld.com/article/163765/so_long_geocities_we_forgot_you_still_existed.html

damn, thats sad.

Yep, I've had more than one geocities site, and I still have one for this avatar that I haven't looked at in ages.

I remember when that was hot stuff. I had dial up service and an 80486. Geocities and RealAudio.

Our digital data, which won't rot or be destroyed by bookworms, is actually more ephemeral than, oh, say, tears in the rain. (I saw the end of Bladerunner lately).

All our LiveJournal posts and tweets and free forum sites will all be gone someday, most likely, and our home copies stored on storage systems with no reader devices still in use. The digital artwork we printed on inkjet printers will have faded. We have paper records from long long ago; in hundreds of years there won't be any records left of people who aren't famous like Britney Spears.

Geocities hosted a great many horrible websites back in the late 90's including my first few.

PageBuilder...R.I.P.

geocities were the first time i recall anything like like a 'neighbourhood' or 'region'.

I hope LL manages to get the asset server off Geocities before it closes...

ahaha

Someone pointed out that, thousands of years from now, the only artifacts from our "modern" civilization that archaeologists will be able to find will be millions and millions of porcelain toilet bowls. The Babylonians used clay tablets, a very enduring medium. We are like mayflies in comparison.

Like Britney Spears? Eww...

lol Me too, black and neeeeeeeeeeeeeon!

I'm surprised they lasted this long. I recall them being referred to as Geoshitties back when they actually mattered and long before Yahoo sucked 'em up. And I can't remember the last time someone gave me a Geocities URL. They're the .com failure that never went away, really.

i learnt a lot on geocities, but things like watermarking and other anti 'resident' actions were never forgotten.
in any case, i think the rise of plesk-enabled hosting packages is what killed geocities, not myspace. geocities was all but dead before myspace even came on the scene.

"plesk"?

Web page interface to control various aspects of your hosting account.

Thanks Jesse, I thought maybe the cat stepped on the keyboard while Nina was typing.

As much as I read about web stuff I don't recall ever seeing that. I've never had a paid hosting account, maybe that is why.

im sure youve seen a plesk frontend at some time or another. most free-webspace upstarts used plesk or something similar rather than code their own users' admin gui.
using plesk a user could create cronjobs, sql dbs, ftp user/passes, email accounts, htaccess directories, manage subdomains, track stats, etc. most popular freeware such as phpbb, imagegallery, phpnuke and mysqladmin were included as 'modules' that could be installed to your site with a click of a button.

http://www.parallels.com/products/plesk/demo/

The free hosting sites I've seen have all used Cpanel, which is apparently the same sort of thing as Plesk.

yes! they are pretty much the same thing.
i know that geocities was only useful for me in the very beginning of my... web education. thats where i was able to learn to write basic html longhand, then advancing into tables and css. but it really couldnt move much past that. i advanced enough that i couldnt care less about some new geocities counter, i needed a way to run a perl script. i need a way to chmod those scripts too. geocities lost me there personally.
the web took another step and we were looking for php/mysql hosting. we needed to activate mod_rewrite and access gd or imagemagick. we wanted to create an ftp login for a mate. geocities failed miserably. companies like hostway were making a mint charging people for every bit of configuration, nickle and diming people to death. but a cpanel or plesk package offered just what we needed, often for free. now it isnt uncommon to have full access to domains and their associated records as well near full control over your hosting environment for as little as $25 a quarter through servage.net or some such thing. thats how i reckon died. they didnt keep up with peoples learning curves and was quickly outgrown by most. these people would leave geocities with their centre justified animated gif farm and do better work elsewhere. geocities never made an attempt to cater to anyone but the noobiest of the noobs.

Lesson to take from this:
Keep your stuff backed up and be prepared to switch to another host any any time.

At least Geocities is giving some warning ahead of time. Back about a decade ago, with the "dot com bust", some companies that hosted sites and articles appeared to be in good shape one day and were belly up, with their servers taken away by the repo man the very next day.

That is why my computer is backed up to disks that I can then store in multiple locations, rather than to a "cloud" system or a computer way off in cyber-space. You never know when it won't be there.

I just emptied my geocities account out that Ive had since 97 lots of good memories there and they will be missed.

Geocities closes tomorrow.

Anyone wanting to save their old Geocities info should act now.

I'm not sure if the cut-off is today at midnight or sometime Monday the 26th, but it's time to retrieve your valuable "under construction" gif files before there gone forever.