A Eulogy for Geocities…

Earlier this week, GeoCities became officially unavailable, a few months since YaHoo! announced its closure. GeoCities began in the mid 1990’s providing free web hosting and later on, paid premium service. GeoCities was initially organized into “cities” or neighborhoods, such as Tokyo for anime and other Asian topics, or SiliconValley for tech topics. When Yahoo! acquired GeoCities in 1999, they switched from the neighborhood based URLs to a customized ones.

I first learned of GeoCities in high school, around a couple of years after the city was introduced to the World Wide Web. I was fascinated with Yu Yu Hakusho then and I would research about the anime in the Net. Information regarding Yu Yu Hakusho, however, was limited and so I thought of creating my own YYH website. After deliberating which web host to use, I settled for GeoCities. I learned HTML and came up with a crude lay-out filled with marquees and Java applets (they were all the rage then). I couldn’t exactly remember that site’s URL but I think it was www.geocities.com/yyh_profiles.

In college, I collaborated with two my my classmates to create another anime site: www.geocities.com/anime_list. Our site contained categorizations of anime characters such as those with cool hair, or those with cool weapons, etc. Later on, we put up fanarts and also wallpapers for download.

Also in college, I decided to create my own personal blog. I knew of the existence of blogging services such as LiveJournal and blogger but I opted to put up my blog in GeoCities because it offered greater control. My HTML skills have somehow improved and I learned CSS so I wanted to try coming up with my own design. However, since GeoCities had no blogging framework, I had to manually arrange my pages such that the latest post comes first. I also had to use HaloScan for the commenting and trackbacking system. My blog was at www.geocities.com/disruptive_camouflage.

Eventually, I grew tired of having to rearrange my pages each time I had a new post so I migrated my blog to WordPress. In fact, the oldest entries at my Wordpress blog came from my GeoCities blog. I still kept the GeoCities site and used it as a file server of sorts.

It’s been almost a decade since I’ve used GeoCities and now, the popular free web hosting site has gone to the far reaches of cyberspace oblivion. It is understandable though why YaHoo! closed GeoCities. With the rising popularity of blogging services and the arrival of social networking sites (which too provide blogging services), GeoCities has fallen out of fashion and its userbase has shrunk. And besides, it’s not making money for YaHoo!, as Rupert Goodwins, editor of ZDNet, said, “I think GeoCities was the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet.”

The curtain has finally closed on GeoCities and some things will be missed forever. Well, goodbye Geocities! You have served me well.

This wasn’t really talked about much in the anime ’sphere, wasn’t it? I’m sure many of us were born before the ’90s era, basked in the HTML awefulness of Web 1.0, visited and/or created anime shrines at one point in our otakudom lives… right?

Geocities closed down, together with a good number of anime sites that shaped me as a fan. *Looks at all the Geocities sites in Anipike and sighs* With the exception of Hate Sites or Clubs, these sites were the epitome of remembering love for animes and mangas. Even until now I’d look back at those times and wonder just how I can make a shrine out of this blog. Or a museum, as ghostlightning once said.

There was this bishounen files site I was so fond of way back high school, with profiles of bishies from various series, classified into various types: the boy-next-door type (I remember Yuu from Marmalade Boy was one of them), the underdogs (Ryoga), the cross-dressers (Nuriko), the evil overlords (Zagato), etc etc. My memory’s a bit fuzzy but there’s a big chance that it was hosted in Geocities. I doubt I’ll ever be able to find that now, obviously.

Someone ought to rebuild that bishie bio database. Now it’s all about moe and GAR, seme and uke. Boy do I love digressing.

First encounter with HTML and Photoshop

I was never inspired to make my own site, lazy as I am, not until 1st year college when it was required by our professor. The year was 2002, back when Neopets was all the craze, and CometZone was still hip and trendy; back when I was still addicted to Ranma 1/2 (I remember using Ranma and Akane’s Ballad as my site BGM lol), YuYu Hakusho, Fushigi Yuugi, Rurouni Kenshin, and Card Captor Sakura. And still into fanart-ing.

I visited my homepage one last time before the D-Day, and a wave of nostalgia came over me as I was looking through my image gallery, most of which were scans of my fanarts and the Newtype magazine I had since 2nd year high school. A walk down memory lane here we go~

(Click on the thumbnails to view the larger image in an overlay window, won’t work through a feed reader)

Low and behold, my first scans, from my first Newtype magazine. Ever.

First impromptu color fanart (woke up in the middle of the night and thought, “I feel like making a fanart of my beloved Kurama-sama, so let’s do that”)

First raburabu fanarts <3

First CG attempt and FAIL

First CG semi-success; first fanart submitted and featured in a local manga-zine. Culture Crash, anyone? Microsoft will so sue me for using that Windows wallpaper for my background.

*cue Winter Sonata’s Memories BGM*

This one’s for you, Geocities:

But you put on quite a show, really had me going.
But now it’s time to go, curtain’s finally closing.
That was quite a show, very entertaining.
But it’s over now…
Go on and take a bow.

Or as SDS says, “Shine On, Geocities. Shine On… Forever”

It was my 2nd year in highschool and I was 16, constantly running away from Britney’s “Oops!… I Did It Again” in those eternal summers of youth. I managed somehow, rocking out to Neon-Genesis Evangelion’s intro by swapping multi-(floppy)-disk zip archives with my friends, and discovering this thing called Anime(lol!). It was either that or dial-up Hyperterminal, downloading it yourself from some random site in Anipike.com or trying your luck in Napster.

So we got techie, learning about the freedom in mp3’s and the internet boom helped us along, albeit slowly at 56kbps, until one day, instead of just visiting Anipike, we thought we’d try our luck with our own tribute/shrine/whatever. My sister was taking Computer Science at the time, and there were plenty of HTML resources online, plus Geocities(God bless his soul!) was offering free hosting with your yahoo mail, so we tried our hand in that.

Mine was called “the Grandstand” to commemorate the bleachers my friends and I usually hung out in. There, along with some game and personal stuff, I also built an anime corner. In hindsight, it was the anime corner that grew the most, housing a menial collection of Fushigi Yuugi pictures, random midi’s(Misato theme!) and large amounts of painstakingly coded HTML code. By code I meant secret links in length marquee’s, thorough use of the tag, and a small banner proclaiming “Proudly made in Notepad” to spite all those perky, oddly-colored, Frontpage users.

We expanded by joining the roster of sites included in Anime-rings’ random links. We also linked to each other–and always href-ed their site at every mention of their name–and signed guestbooks prolifically. All the while, religiously monitoring our daily visit site-counters. And then Google happened, and Blogger/Livejournal was born, and Anipike sorta fizzled out and we found out about going outside.

But I stop by ever-so-often. And though I have to jump through the Wayback Machine because geocities got tired of hosting me, the nostalgia and the indomitable optimism of those teenage years will always be online.

Share your Geocities story and we might just unleash a torrent of nostalgia right here

Further Reading

SDS’s eulogy posts for Geocities, where a number of people also shared their stories.

AstroNerdBoy reminded us to archive old GeoCities anime sites back when the news came about.

princetrunks also shared his Geocities tale, which explains the Web 1.0 look and feel of his site.

toonleap showed his geocities sites before, though unfortunately we can no longer access them. Except maybe through the Wayback Engine.

Reminiscing the Analog Otaku Life Days

Popularity: 2% [?]

Related posts:

1. Cross Game Commercial Break: Nomo’s Picture Drawing Song~!