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Ask HN: What Was Geocities.com?

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Re: Ask HN: What Was Geocities.com?

#14

Post by albatros2ko »

thescribbblr wrote: post #9
flukus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit like wix a bit like dreamweaver/frontpage and a bit like myspace rolled into one, free hosting and an applet based WYSIWIG editor. Also a bunch of components like chat, guestbooks, webrings, etc. The also had a virtual community concept, with street addresses so you had neighbors and things like that. In retrospect that was a terrible idea, but maybe the analogy helped some less technical people.

So it provided some way to insert components like we see today or you can write html code as it is and the page gets created?

there is a modern version of geocities, you can see what sites used to look like back in Web 1.0 https://neocities.org/browse

geocities was the most popular way of having your own personal website back in the day, people were making websites for fun and you can see it in the sites and pages they created, overflowing with personality and quirks.

Re: Ask HN: What Was Geocities.com?

#16

Post by ZguideZ »

For many of us, Geocities was an introduction to having a personal website and building community through the internet. Personally, I wish the old geocities sites were still accessible. Believe it or not - since this was before search engines (really) and wikipedia (really) many geocities sites were treasure troves of links that led to a world of information.

Re: Ask HN: What Was Geocities.com?

#17

Post by tetrisgm »

Geocities was a service people used to make web pages. It was one of the first places online where people got an Internet presence. People used it to make pages about themselves, their families, their pets, and their hobbies.

It didn't require any coding skills, and you could make a little page and suddenly be on the Internet. Back then, search engines were very basic, so there was this common idea of needing to have your domain, your site (both words being used traditionally to describe land and property), so you'd have presence. A more recent analog Myspace, where people could have a profile, show off what they liked, these kinds of things.

Fun fact: the entire Geocities archive was saved by a bunch of fans (I saw them at DWeb Camp this summer) and is below 500Gb - so it can fit on an SD card!

There's also a fan effort to recreate the experience of Geocities, called Neocities. It has a bunch of fan pages that will give you an idea of what Geoticies was like.

Re: Ask HN: What Was Geocities.com?

#19

Post by ZguideZ »

ZguideZ wrote: post #18
hn17 wrote: post #15

https://web.archive.org/web/19961226152953/http://www1.geoci...

Ha! The internet was better back then. Thanks for this...too bad it only goes a couple of links deep...

I used to spend a lot of time with the kooks because conspiracy theories used to be fun instead of dangerous - https://web.archive.org/web/19961220171417/http://www.geocit...

Re: Ask HN: What Was Geocities.com?

#20

Post by thescribbblr »

tetrisgm wrote: post #17

Geocities was a service people used to make web pages. It was one of the first places online where people got an Internet presence. People used it to make pages about themselves, their families, their pets, and their hobbies. It didn't require any coding skills, and you could make a little page and suddenly be on the Internet. Back then, search engines were very basic, so there was this common idea of needing to have…

Thank you so much your comment really answered my query. I am also more curious to checkout NeoCities.
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