These pages are not under construction

February 7, 2013 6:51 AM

Thanks to the Archive Team's rescue of Geocities (previously), you can now stroll down memory lane with One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op, a Tumblr of Geocities screenshots generated in Netscape 4.51.
posted by Horace Rumpole (32 comments total)

I feel like this kid is now on metafilter. Come on fess up, who's Rory? I promise to tell you Ya Cool.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:58 AM on February 7, 2013 [2 favorites]

Yeah, that kid was up waaay past his bedtime..
posted by obscurator at 7:01 AM on February 7, 2013

It's a weird world where 'random sampling of Geocities' == 'best of the web'.

And yet here we are.
posted by mazola at 7:02 AM on February 7, 2013 [3 favorites]

Kilobyte Age? Never heard it. Byte Age, Megabyte Age and Gigabyte Age (current). Now moving to the Terabyte Age. Lot of ages.
posted by stbalbach at 7:02 AM on February 7, 2013

An internet of people sharing their own ideas (even if they're a bit looney) instead of endlessly snarking on the faults of others. I remember that internet. Glad I was there to see the frontier.
posted by tripping daisy at 7:05 AM on February 7, 2013 [17 favorites]

It makes me physically angry that Yahoo hasn't just given (or redirected) the geocities.com URL to the Archive Team people.
posted by roll truck roll at 7:09 AM on February 7, 2013 [2 favorites]

Man, I wish these were the real thing & not just screen caps. Memories of surfing around via my AOL dialup account on my Centris 610, when you could go from site to site to site, clicking random links because no one was concerned with "retaining eyeballs" & everyone was willing to try their hand a building a page & learning a little html to make it happen... I feel old.

Think I'll go outside & sing the modemsong quietly to myself.
posted by Devils Rancher at 7:10 AM on February 7, 2013 [3 favorites]

I particularly like that there's a link to every geocities page in the screenshot post, even though the link, of course, gives a 'page not found' message. A little lure, when one might actually want to read past that first page, that acts as a reminder that all this was washed away.
posted by frimble at 7:10 AM on February 7, 2013

Oh, I miss this. I'm not all that old but to me, this will always be how the internet is 'supposed' to be.
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:11 AM on February 7, 2013 [3 favorites]

WHERE ARE THE FLAMING SKULLS?

I've scrolled like almost three pages, and yet, no flaming skulls.

Shenanigans!
posted by eriko at 7:14 AM on February 7, 2013 [3 favorites]

Oh those warm summer nights I spent lost in Ron's Poetry Garden.
posted by griphus at 7:15 AM on February 7, 2013 [5 favorites]

I wish I could remember where my Geocities page was, or that there was a good way to search for it, or that I even remembered what moniker I was going by back then.
posted by zengargoyle at 7:36 AM on February 7, 2013

Webpages don't welcome me to their homepages when I arrive anymore. They've lost all their manners.
posted by rh at 7:49 AM on February 7, 2013 [1 favorite]

HELLO AND WELCOME TO STEVE'S BILLY JOEL FANSITE

PLEASE ENTER YOUR NAME:

penis

WELCOME TO STEVE'S BILLY JOEL FANSITE NaN
posted by griphus at 7:52 AM on February 7, 2013 [6 favorites]

Man, remember when one of the constraints you had to design web pages around was dial-up download times?
posted by gauche at 7:53 AM on February 7, 2013 [2 favorites]

This is what most academic web pages still look like.
posted by jeffamaphone at 7:56 AM on February 7, 2013

This is great.
Also worth a look is the Please Register This Shareware tumblr. A tumblr of shareware registration screens.
posted by pravit at 7:57 AM on February 7, 2013 [5 favorites]

I was vastly worse than the worse page in this. In the beginning, I scorned the web completely.
posted by Goofyy at 7:58 AM on February 7, 2013

Oh man I hope they got a screenshot of my long lost perpetually-under-construction Pink Floyd Tribute page
posted by Elly Vortex at 8:06 AM on February 7, 2013

Looking at this gives me an almost painful spike of nostalgia. It's not that these particular sites are especially great or anything, but I think it really is better for people to make things they're passionate about with enthusiasm than to join some marginally creepy, basically useless "service" just because everyone else they know has. Ideally, we could've found some in between where a few places on the web get an established presence but it's still "normal" to go do your own thing for the fun of it; we've kind of just allowed the corporate side to raze nearly everything else, though, and it just feels weird.

Here we are, finally having the technology to do the things we dreamed about doing in the 90s, but all that stuff's passe now so let's just shrug and shuffle toward our lopsided panopticon intranet. Life is so weird.
posted by byanyothername at 8:18 AM on February 7, 2013 [3 favorites]

Ideally, we could've found some in between where a few places on the web get an established presence but it's still "normal" to go do your own thing for the fun of it; we've kind of just allowed the corporate side to raze nearly everything else, though, and it just feels weird.

So it's like the 1980s of the internet?
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:22 AM on February 7, 2013 [1 favorite]

Man, remember when one of the constraints you had to design web pages around was dial-up download times?

That's why you reused your assets as much as possible. Once Netscape downloaded and cached the first flaming skull gif, adding a dozen more of them in a ring around your totally bitching logo was practically free!
posted by Mayor West at 8:30 AM on February 7, 2013 [4 favorites]

... memories of looking up how to do this ...
posted by kurumi at 8:30 AM on February 7, 2013

Holy crap, pravit, I totally remember a few of those! Like this one. Wow.
posted by en forme de poire at 8:41 AM on February 7, 2013

Now where did I leave my copy of HoTMetaL.
posted by humboldt32 at 9:44 AM on February 7, 2013

That's why you reused your assets as much as possible. Once Netscape downloaded and cached the first flaming skull gif, adding a dozen more of them in a ring around your totally bitching logo was practically free!

I remember an article somewhere, maybe on A List Apart, about "spriting" your design elements into one .gif and just clipping parts of it out selectively (so, for instance, you'd have a row of button graphics in "neutral" appearance and just below them another row in "hover" appearance and another row below those in "active" appearance and you'd just adjust the y coordinates on hover and click but it would only need to load one big .gif for all your buttons.)

This article here, actually.
posted by gauche at 10:01 AM on February 7, 2013

I made heavy use of the preload javascript that came with GoLive.

Welcome to GoLive 4!
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:37 AM on February 7, 2013

Well - if you want an archive of live pages (not screencaps), there is reocities... They tried to get as much of it as they could before they were shut down. Whether yours or someone you loved (or hated)'s page is on there, I could not say, but you surely can try it out. Just use the same url, except reocities instead of geocities.

I may or may not have a page there (oh... dear).
posted by symbioid at 1:59 PM on February 7, 2013

Proof that there's nothing so ugly it can't inspire nostalgia.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:03 PM on February 7, 2013

Man, why'd the house/building metaphor die out? I'd like to think of myself being in MetaFilter's living room right now. I guess MetaTalk would be the bathroom.
posted by ignignokt at 4:06 PM on February 7, 2013

So many broken image tags.
So few image maps.

And webrings? Gosh, I remember webrings.

But this is my favourite.
posted by Mezentian at 7:03 PM on February 7, 2013

I wonder if Rory (mentioned in the first comment) grew up to own this: http://www.thinkmac.co.uk
posted by panaceanot at 12:36 AM on February 8, 2013