Yahoo has announced that they are shutting down GeoCities later this year. I'll bet a lot of you out there don't have any clue what GeoCities even is, and the internet veterans out there usually think of animated gifs and home pages like this when they hear the name. Now don't get me wrong, the interwebs has pretty much passed GeoCities by. Everybody's out tweeting now, who has time to update that old web page with the under construction gif blinking away on it? Still, for someone sho has been online over a decade, Yahoo flushing GeoCities is kind of like your mom throwing out your old card collection. Sure, most of it was beat up commons from the mid '80s, but what about the 1965 Willie Mays card you paid 30 bucks for at the card show in the early '90s? What about that stack of 1956 Topps cards that were in the box too? Oh my God, I had a couple of 1933 Goudeys in there and a mangled T206 of Ed Walsh! What the hell, mom?!!?!
Luckily, there is enough warning so that users can move their site to another host and some enterprising individuals are trying to save it all. At any rate, If you have a GeoCities site or know of a particularly useful one, it's time to save it or lose it. One site I have gotten a lot of good information out of in the past is Chris Stufflestreet's Vintage Baseball Cards site. There are a ton of checklists and card history on there along with an archive of newsletters that read much like an excellent card blog. I'm really hoping that the site gets moved to a new host or gets turned into a blog. Most of the stuff on the web is extremely impermanent so if you know of any great GeoCities sites (or have one of your own) that could be lost it's time to make a copy of it while you can.
10 comments:
Anyone remember Xoom? Homested?
Man, I'm old.
I love the fact that the first article (April 2002) is essentially dedicated to book value.
To show everyone how goddamn old I am, here's my geocities page I started back in the mid 90's and haven't looked at since 2002!
http://www.geocities.com/jeffwolfe2002
It's like going back in time! I didn't even know GeoCities was still up! I'm gonna have to save this crap!
My first attempt at a website was GeoCities in the mid 90s. My first real site, The Federal Republic of Benland, was hosted at Dreamwater from 1999 until 2002 when I got tired of keeping it updated.
The current tag line that I have at 88 Score, "Enjoy your visit and please don't step on anything" came from my old Benland site. I figured I'd at least keep some of it alive.
I still feel behind the time with all these blogs, and youtube. I don't know... I kinda miss the old days. Of course, I've also had a cellphone for ten years and have never sent nor received a text message and I haven't chatted on an instant messenger since I got out of college in 2003.
I wonder if the WayBackMachine is going to preserve any of that content...
I had a Tripod page before moving it to Blogger. I hope the 'good' stuff out there gets moved, too...
Oh, yeah - Xoom, Homestead, CompuServe... Anyone old enough to know what PeopleConnection is? that's not only old, it's a whole different platform...
I remember all of those. It looks like I'm going to have to find a new home for my want lists. Damn!
Xoom and Homestead, Tripod, CompuServe, oh yeah. I have a long forgotten account on AngelFire somewhere too. Don't remember PeopleConnection though.
My very first fantasy baseball team was on Prodigy.
Steve - check out Google Docs for wantlists. It looks pretty cool. Check out Grand Cards' wantlists to see what it looks like.
Cool, I'll check that out.
You just reminded me that I had a long forgotten Talk City account. I don't even remember what kind of website I built on there.
Man I hate that. I remember tinkering around with Geocities back in the day. I have one Geocities site bookmarked. Its a site dedicated to the Topps All Star Rookie Cards.
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