
The Geocities Gallery - kyledrake
https://geocities.restorativland.org/
======
dang
By coincidence, I ran across this last night:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=cameronsworld.net](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=cameronsworld.net)

[https://www.cameronsworld.net/](https://www.cameronsworld.net/)

~~~
kyledrake
Love that site! That was made by Cameron Askin if anyone is interested:
[https://www.cameronaskin.info/](https://www.cameronaskin.info/)

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sp332
[https://blog.geocities.institute/](https://blog.geocities.institute/) has
been doing analyses of Geocities images, page design, character encoding etc.

~~~
kyledrake
Recommend following
[https://twitter.com/GIFmodel](https://twitter.com/GIFmodel) and
[https://twitter.com/despens](https://twitter.com/despens). A lot of the code
for cleaning up the archive torrent came from them (the original torrent was a
really nasty mess, it took a lot of work to clean it up).

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Sohcahtoa82
Every time I see a GeoCities archive, I look for my old site, which I could
have _sworn_ was at TimesSquare/9994, but it's never there. Were inactive
accounts purged at some point and it got flushed away before people started
mirroring GeoCities? Or is it more likely that I just don't properly remember
what my page URL was?

~~~
kyledrake
It looks like it's there but there wasn't an index.html:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20010522100243/http://www.geocit...](https://web.archive.org/web/20010522100243/http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/9994/)

This gallery has scrubbed any sites that didn't have an index.html, but the
directory listing sites should be restored in a future version.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
Ah, that makes sense.

Looks like Archive.org didn't archive any of the files, only the directory
listing. Kinda worried what body.gif was. >.>

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bkloppenborg
A while back I found a copy of my 1998-era and early 2000s websites on an old
hard disk. The data were incomplete, so I went through a pretty fun process of
recovering much of the missing information from Archive.org. Then I fixed the
HTML to comply with more modern standards. I wrote up a blog post about it
here: [https://www.kloppenborg.net/blog/2019/07/04/restoring-
maxis-...](https://www.kloppenborg.net/blog/2019/07/04/restoring-maxis-ville).
I put the website (pure HTML) up here: [https://maxis-
ville.kloppenborg.net/](https://maxis-ville.kloppenborg.net/)

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superkuh
Aw. It seems like they have samples of all of CapeCanaveral communities except
"Launchpad" which was of course the coolest. It just returns a page not found.

~~~
kyledrake
I might be able to get some of this restored in a future version of the
archive, if it's at the internet archive.

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gukov
I miss the old internet.

~~~
jerglingu
Amen. I play and watch Pokemon with my son these days, and can't help but
frequently be taken back in time to the mid-late 90's when websites were raw
and so many pockets of the internet didn't have a lick of even bare bones CSS.
Memorials like this incapacitate me with nostalgia.

~~~
jaimex2
Ditto. Now the Internet is just a centralised clock work orange.

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yllus
Aw, my couch co-op (before it was really even named that) focused gaming
website wasn't featured in the gallery:

[https://geocities.restorativland.org/TimesSquare/Arcade/2516...](https://geocities.restorativland.org/TimesSquare/Arcade/2516/)

~~~
kyledrake
It's there:
[https://geocities.restorativland.org/TimesSquare/Arcade/](https://geocities.restorativland.org/TimesSquare/Arcade/)

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orionblastar
There was a Geocities like web creator called Neocities
[https://neocities.org/](https://neocities.org/) I think it is still up.

~~~
thedaemon
It is up. You shouldn't post a link and not be bothered to check it.

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cowboycoder_
This is really cool. Would love to know more about the restoration process and
if there is any way to contribute to the project as a developer

~~~
kyledrake
Haven't gotten to it yet, but eventually going to
[https://github.com/restorativland](https://github.com/restorativland) and
will be open source. In the interim, the current mess of random code I'm using
is here (a little out of date ATM): [https://github.com/kyledrake/geocities-
archive-toolshed](https://github.com/kyledrake/geocities-archive-toolshed)

I've had to do a lot of starting from scratch as I find new issues and
discover better ways to solve existing ones, but once I get it figured it out,
it will work for other 90s sites too, and I'm hoping to release them more as
general use tools than just scripts.

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alpb
Anyone know why GeoCities has these "categories" and subcategories under them
and not something like geocities.com/{NUMBER} ? Was it randomly assigned or
chosen by users

I used GeoCities extensively to host my sites, but I was only 9 or 10 years
old, so it never occurred to me what these are for. Now I'm thinking if they
were sharding hosting servers by URL routes.

~~~
kalleboo
When it originally launched, the "Cities" part was quite literal. To find a
free "plot", you browsed a map of a town and found an empty space, and then
you had 2 "neighbors" next to you. This was back when webrings[0] were still a
thing and the web still had a bit more of a community feel to it.

I remember when I tried to sign up they had a beta "empty plot search" so you
didn't have to spend ages looking for a plot. IIRC it didn't work for me and I
went to Angelfire or something.

It quickly became really popular as a free web host (which was rare at the
time) and they toned down the cities/communities aspect in favor of pure
hosting.

edit: I tried to find the neighborhood map on the internet archive but it
seems hidden behind imagemaps and CGI scripts that didn't make it into the
archive. This is as far as I got:
[https://web.archive.org/web/19970703013607/http://www15.geoc...](https://web.archive.org/web/19970703013607/http://www15.geocities.com/Broadway/residence.html)
You can also see some of the community aspect here
[https://web.archive.org/web/19970703013533/http://www15.geoc...](https://web.archive.org/web/19970703013533/http://www15.geocities.com/Broadway/leader.html)

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring)

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jaimex2
Oh wow.

I was just a kid in high school when I made my first HTML site on geocities.
It's so cool to see it has still lived on in archives.

Flash content still alive and well... the javascript current year broke,
probably y2k ... the geocities provided page view counter is also dead :)

It's also alarming how instantly without effort I recalled my ridiculously
long address on there from memory.

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davedx
Ahh my first website was a GeoCities page. They had a pretty awesome (for the
time) HTML editing web app (CGI-BIN) and it was an amazing feeling.

Looks like my page at Tokyo/Towers isn't in the list. Looking at some of the
content I think this archive is from after one of the buyouts that happened
later.

So much Sailor Moon, Robotech and Dragon Ball Z... :D

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hobotron
Really enjoying the myspace music player. Kudos.

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pmlnr
So much character on each page. Yes, they were simple, but they were all
unique. I miss websites with personalities.

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x3igh7
Great work.

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redis_mlc
I had some colocation in Exodus 1 next to the Geocities cage.

They used thousands of SCSI Lacie consumer drives connected to Sun
workstations in a cage about 10'x10'.

And a large fan blowing all that heat into their neighbor's cage.

~~~
bilegeek
Found some pictures of this.

While the wiring is a bit of a mess, it seemed to have been fairly well
managed overall. Or at least it wasn't completely cluttered.

[http://www.detritus.org/mike/gc/](http://www.detritus.org/mike/gc/)

~~~
pottertheotter
This makes me so nostalgic! While there are so many great things about
technology these days, I miss the Silicon Valley of those days. So many things
were brand new and truly cutting edge.

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hnewsshadowbans
Theres a ton of treasure from the old web. Hope more of this stuff comes
online.

