I Never Moved to GeoCity

Today marks the end of GeoCities, that bastion of mid-90s web publishing. The service laid the groundwork for blogs, allowed people to develop web coding skills, and gave kids an outlet to dump their crap onto the web long before places like MySpace and LiveJournal came around. Sure you had to put up with a long, convoluted URL, but everyone was used to that sort of thing back then. This was a simpler internet time, a time before Google and Flash gunked up everything. Pure HTML. Bizarre GIF animation. Guest books.

I never moved to GeoCity. I never set up residence in one of its strange neighborhoods filled with tiled backgrounds so ugly they make MySpace look like the Louvre. No, I was a citizen of that burgh down the road: Angelfire.

The two were essentially identical. Both let users create a web site for free, either by filling out standard fields (like "my bookmarks"), or by coding straight up. I remember in grade school, especially 7th and 8th grade, really getting in to Angelfire. Everyone in my class did. I can distinctly remember running something like three websites at once, and reveling in each hit my little counter recorded. At the end of the school day, the home room teacher would let us all scribble our enormous URLs on the chalkboard to promote our websites. Then students would write down said URLs (usually taking up an entire line of loose leaf paper in our Trapper Keepers) and going home to check them out. Of course, the odds of someone writing the URL correctly on the board, and everyone copying down the URL correctly in their binders, and then typing it in correctly in Netscape at home were pretty slim. Angelfire was a beautiful thing.

I don't remember much about what content was on my websites. One extolled the virtues of artistic creativity. I accomplished this by loading the page with as many crazy animated things as I could find.

I do remember my most popular site: Jabroni Drive. You see, back in grade school pro wrestling was huge--perhaps the biggest its ever been outside of its '80s hayday. I named my website after one of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's key phrases, and began writing reviews and recaps of the weekly wrestling shows and monthly pay-per-views. I really put a lot of time into this thing, and probably produced a level of commentary only slightly harsher than what may have come from the wrestlers' parents. Still, I felt a sense of ownership about my website, I just regret not keeping it up long enough to earn press credentials.

Sadly, that site, and any of the other random Angelfire sites me and my classmates made a decade or so ago, is gone. And now, an entire city of lovingly crafted web relics are gone. Sure people didn't really need GeoCities or Angelfire anymore, what with the combination of blogs, social networking tools, and web applications, but it was always nice knowing they were there... keeping the GIF alive.