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RIP Geocities

It's all a bit hazy now but as far as I can remember, sometimes in the late 1990s, after I finally got an Internet connection (pay as go dial up, no doubt) at my parents' house in the middle of nowhere, I started looking at building my own website. Using publisher I put together a couple of pages both in French and in English and looked at a way to put them online. Lots of animated GIFs ensued...

I quickly came across Geocities and Angelfire which offered webhosting for free. I am not even sure those few webpages made it online and there have been several attempt at creating my own site.

In August 2001 when I took over as moderator of my newly founded reading group, I decided that a website would be useful and once again I turned towards Geocities. The site has been online ever since, though it underwent a much needed redesign in 2005, loosing the black background and the GIFs that had been the canons of amateur webdesign a few years before.

For over a decade, Geocities were never very far off in the background as I was teaching myself HTML and webdesign, sinking deeper and deeper into geekdom.

Today, even though I have never been formally trained in that domain, I hold a job as web manager, and it is partly thanks to Geocities.

And today, Yahoo! who has been owning if for several years, has pulled the plug on Geocities. It is more.

A page of the early years of the Internet as a mass media dies today.

Things have and will move a lot since then...

You can read other reminiscences by Geocities geeks on Mashable here.
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