I made my first couple of websites on GeoCities back in 1997 for my 2 favourite tv shows at the time: Xena and The X-Files. I wish they had been archived somewhere. I remember how watching the visitor counters go up into the tens of thousands for each one of them felt like an enormous accomplishment, like I had peaked in life. Good times.
GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
61–70 of 89 posts
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#62My first foray into "programming", or at least something programming-adjacent, was getting the book "Make Your Own Web Page - A Guide for Kids!"[1] at a Scholastic Book Fair at my school. It was actually a pretty decent introduction to HTML, considering it was written for children in 1998, and it got me interested in learning a lot more about computers. "Websites" had seemed like these quasi-mythical things that I th…
> "Websites" had seemed like these quasi-mythical things that I thought only really rich people or big companies could make
That idea seems to be coming back.
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#63This 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…
I absolutely abhor this idea that there are "tech people" and "non tech people". It's complete defeatest bullshit. When I was 12 years old setting up a website in 1997 I was not a "tech person", I was someone curious and motivated enough to learn a very simple skill (html). There's nothing special about me. We don't talk about "bread people" and "non bread people," we just talk about people who decide to learn to make bread. There are not "driving people" and "non driving people" there are those who have learned to drive and those who haven't. I'm sick of this stupid divide. You either care to learn a skill or not.
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#64The internet died when GeoCities died
Not true. The Internet grew up on the day that GeoCities died. It had to go out there in the corporate madness and try to get a job. A sad reality of life.
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals. I don't know. There are kids making games in Roblox now, editing movies and doing all kinds of things, but Hacker News would still consider them "nontechnical" because they have social media accounts.
Today I explained to a sales engineer working at a Fortune 500 company how to open an Incognito window in Google Chrome. Maybe the inflection point was the transition between Windows XP and Windows Vista. In XP, the default behavior was to show file extentions in Windows file explorer. In subsequent Windown releases, file extentions for known file types were hidden by default. This led to future generations being les…
The inflection point was iOS
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#66I loved Sailor moon in the 90s and made My first website in notepad in 1997 about my fav Sailor scout https://web.archive.org/web/19991001193925/http://www.geocit... It was so exciting to find a new comment in your guestbook
You had terrible taste in the 90s, the best Sailor scout was obviously Ami/Amy ;)
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#67One 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…
It was a nice way to organize things so you could find stuff serendipitously. I remember clicking around in my neighborhood (where I had my N64 cheat codes website) and finding some cool website with lots of slick looking 3D renders. It's rare to stumble across unplanned-for things like that nowadays.
>It's rare to stumble across unplanned-for things like that nowadays.
The phrase "stumble across" made me think of StumbleUpon. And StumbleUpon made me think of HN.
I think we still have serendipity, but there's almost always some implicit popularity or recommendations filter. Hard to sample uniformly at random from the internet. And there doesn't seem to be a ton of demand for that, either.
Probably the best argument for readers sampling uniformly at random is actually on the supply side. It'd be better if content wasn't so optimized for popularity.
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#68How big would the entire geocities db have been? A few gigabyes? Can't be much larger than wiki. db I guess only Google still have a relatively completel archive locked away somewhere after they removed cached viewing.
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think of technical and nontechnical as a spectrum, the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals. 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, de…
>> not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database. Aside: the first time I put some data in a database table, and built a page to display it in the browser is one of those head exploding moments from my life. I'm pretty sure it was MS Access, classic ASP (there were... 4? objects total to learn?) and IIS Express.
> Aside: the first time I put some data in a database table, and built a page to display it in the browser is one of those head exploding moments from my life.
This kickstarted webdev for me too. I remember the moment exactly.
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#70GeoCities was the place you’d go to if you didn't have access to an Internet account with web hosting. I had a page there, don’t remember the location at all. Search wasn’t a priority.
At this point I was working in an Internet startup building client-side side tools.
GeoCities did one thing really well, building pages on the Web. All you needed was a browser. Innovative.
Compare this to downloading, then installing software on a Win95 box. Work on some markup, FTP the HTML, graphics, stylesheets to the server. A hint to the future you’d see in 2003 with WP. [1]
Reference
[1] Wordpress, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress