31–40 of 89 posts
I still remember all those "guides" about how to design your page, so that the annoying forced ad gets not served / shown.
window.top.location = window.location
Good times, those were.
https://neocities.org/ Geocities inspired site available today.
Nowadays this type of static site is insanely cheap to host. Put a CDN like CloudFlare (which it seems they are using) in front of this type of site and you could scale to millions of hits basically for free.
One thing nobody remembers (or at least never writes about in these retrospectives) from the early days of Geocities is you literally had to virtually "walk" up and down "blocks" in the the "neighborhoods" to find a "vacant lot" to put your site in. When I initially tried to sign up, they had some beta of a "vacant lot finder" cgi form that didn't work. It wasn't like these days where you just sign up and get an acco…
I remember it was controversial and "the beginning of the end" when you no longer had to host at a 4-digit number and could, gasp, use a string for your URL: www.geocities.com/mywebpage instead of www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5372 . The "Acropolis" is because the main top-level "neighborhoods" quickly filled up so you had to pick a sub-neighborhood, making your URL even longer. Another fun aspect of all this is…
I am a firm believer that if the web had working authoring support as originally planned in the proposal document[1] (phase 2), these early web building services wouldn't have been nearly as popular, or would have even been entirely unnecessary. The web would've grown in a distributed way with people having full control over the data they share. Centralized services might not have evolved into the commercial behemoth…
document.designMode = 'on'
I am a firm believer that if the web had working authoring support as originally planned in the proposal document[1] (phase 2), these early web building services wouldn't have been nearly as popular, or would have even been entirely unnecessary. The web would've grown in a distributed way with people having full control over the data they share. Centralized services might not have evolved into the commercial behemoth…
I suspect the reasons why it never caught on were much simpler. Most of the early adopters were very enthusiastic, wanted to contribute, and there were many niches where one could contribute something new. Then there is the whole issue of design, which makes publishing on the web a relatively high effort proposition. Even with GUI editors, it is much closer to desktop publishing than word processing. The former never really caught on outside of professional work because it is high effort. Blogs and wikis are more popular, with the effort being closer to word processing. Yet even that is a bit much, given that the very low effort social media seems to be dominant these days.
Then there are things like hosting. Hosting has always been easy to find, but it is harder to find something stable across time. And discoverability, which has always been an issue but at least centralized services mitigate some of that. And the whole social angle, which instantly makes it more complex to setup and manage.
When I made some awful website with stolen pictures and a lot of awful colors that didn't match (with of course a bright lime green background, obviously), I needed a place to publish my code, and that book recommended Geocities at the very end, and I did. No one ever really went to my site outside of supportive friends and relatives, but it was still a lot of fun to talk to the other kids at my school and brag about how I had my own website. Keep in mind, this would have been around ~1999-2000, I would have been about 8-9 years old. This was before everyone had a MySpace; the fact that I had a website was considered "kind of cool". I thought it was anyway.
I loved GeoCities. I miss the world when everyone had their own awful web pages. Social media made things more approachable, and is in most ways better, but I think something is lost in the centralization of everything.
[1] https://a.co/d/4AYuTSx not a referral link or anything.
I am a firm believer that if the web had working authoring support as originally planned in the proposal document[1] (phase 2), these early web building services wouldn't have been nearly as popular, or would have even been entirely unnecessary. The web would've grown in a distributed way with people having full control over the data they share. Centralized services might not have evolved into the commercial behemoth…
i think the bigger challenge was highly available hosting. there were authoring tools aplenty.
In many ways, we've actually regressed over the past 30 years, to the point where people say that the average person couldn't even create their own page before Web 2.0. And the web has become much more homogenized as a result, and most of the platforms people gravitate to, starting with Web 2.0, went for quick throw away engagement instead of more thoughtful evergreen content.
One thing nobody remembers (or at least never writes about in these retrospectives) from the early days of Geocities is you literally had to virtually "walk" up and down "blocks" in the the "neighborhoods" to find a "vacant lot" to put your site in. When I initially tried to sign up, they had some beta of a "vacant lot finder" cgi form that didn't work. It wasn't like these days where you just sign up and get an acco…
This came up the other day and it became clear that many people, even on HN, don't realize that in the late 90's it was pretty common for non-tech people to have their own websites. There were many places where you could do this for free, and it was extremely easy to spin up a simple one. The actual content being shared - text and images - isn't really different from the majority of the content that's still being sha…
And there was only so much to learn, too, at least as far as web development went-- not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database.
Today I think those types of nontechnical people are pursuing far more lucrative niches in product management, design, ux, marketing and stuff like that over basic webdev work.