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GeoCities dies today; spawned blinking, blaring, broken-icon style of Web design

11:38 AM Mon, Oct 26, 2009 |
By Sheila Lennon    Email this author |   Email this entry

xkcd2.jpg


GeoCities' time has expired, Yahoo closing the site today. Los Angeles Times:


We always imagined how this might end: GeoCities would finally take down all of the animated "under construction" signs, and we'd hear one last Midi file to the tune of horns playing taps.

Instead, GeoCities will probably go down with a whimper today...

Web comic XKCD honors the Geocities era by redesigning its site to include the blinking, color-changing background, broken image icons, bevel-edged tables and animated gifs that marked the first days of amateur Web design -- not quite a golden age, more a tinny era.

Who could forget...

dancing_baby.gif

Here's a real GeoCities page with a midi fanfare and all the random tchotchkes of the GeoCities toolkit. It is archived and linked on the earliest GeoCities page at the Internet Archive as,

HotSprings 1837
So you hit the snooze bar ten times every morning. You might be lazy. But then again, you might have a sleep disorder. Find out here.
oldgeo.jpg


Bonus: Welcome to the World's Worst Website!

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2 Comments

Swati - Online Author said:

The dancing baby cracks me up :D :D .. Geocities was the site where I created my first HTML page, when writing web pages was considered super cool thing. Yahoo should have sold the site instead of pulling the plug.

Link | October 26, 2009 1:44 PM
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Boxer in Spain said:

I too had my first website on Geocities. It served me very well. RIP Geocities.

Link | October 27, 2009 5:18 AM
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