The City of Lost Web Pages

When you've been on the internet as long as I have (10+ years), certain names come to hold certain connotations.  'Wikipedia' is synonymous with dubious information, '56k' means 'slow as molasses', and 'GeoCities' is synonymous with tacky homepages.  That is, until today.

Parent company Yahoo! announced back in April that it would be closing the GeoCities free web-hosting service on October 26, 2009.  Well, today is the day.  Ever since 1995, GeoCities has allowed web users to build and maintain personal homepages, fan sites, and other pages.  Many of the sites were rudimentary at best, tacky eyesores at worst.

Efforts to preserve and archive the GeoCities pages have been started by Internet Archive, InternetArcheology.org, and a number of other sites.  Webcomic artist Randall Munroe even changed the layout of his own website to commemorate the occasion:

Most people in their mid-twenties were first exposed to the internet through personal site builders like GeoCities.  I remember cobbling together fan sites for my favorite TV shows back when I was 10 or 11.  They're outdated technology in the age of Blogger, but it's good to know that us old internet fogies can go someplace to revisit the good ol' days of the web.

Fare thee well, GeoCities.  Your time has come and gone.