Bring Me Your Purple Unicorns
October 28, 2009 9:46 PM Subscribe
Bring me the worst of GeoCities. No, really.
Now that GeoCities is gone, my interest has been revived. (Ain't that always the way?) A Google image search for "GeoCities screenshots" delivers surprisingly few satisfactory results. I know there is a "MetaFilter's own" archiving project, but I don't want to randomly plough through that hoping to hit GeoCities gold.
I would instead like to see specific examples of spectacular GeoCities pages. Maybe you've bookmarked a tasty homage to purple unicorns and dancing fairies from the archive? Perhaps your favourite screenshots are carefully stashed away on Photobucket or in a recent article I've missed? Or maybe there's a blog dedicated to such things.
But surely, there are still priceless, precious screenshots somewhere. Right?
Now that GeoCities is gone, my interest has been revived. (Ain't that always the way?) A Google image search for "GeoCities screenshots" delivers surprisingly few satisfactory results. I know there is a "MetaFilter's own" archiving project, but I don't want to randomly plough through that hoping to hit GeoCities gold.
I would instead like to see specific examples of spectacular GeoCities pages. Maybe you've bookmarked a tasty homage to purple unicorns and dancing fairies from the archive? Perhaps your favourite screenshots are carefully stashed away on Photobucket or in a recent article I've missed? Or maybe there's a blog dedicated to such things.
But surely, there are still priceless, precious screenshots somewhere. Right?
Reocities is trying to archive Geocities.
posted by thesmallmachine at 9:57 PM on October 28, 2009 [1 favorite]
posted by thesmallmachine at 9:57 PM on October 28, 2009 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: OK sorry, I think I wasn't very clear. I know about the Way Back Machine, ReoCities, etc but that still means I have to randomly click around hoping to hit paydirt. What I'm looking for is specific sites hosted on GeoCities that were wonderfully horrendous, now saved either as archives or as screenshots.
posted by DarlingBri at 10:03 PM on October 28, 2009
posted by DarlingBri at 10:03 PM on October 28, 2009
Jack's "MIDI Music" Home Page (music warning) is, believe it or not, actively maintained to this day. (The link is to a non-Geocities URL, but is a carbon-copy of the original site which existed until the shutdown day.)
BeatlesNumber9.com is another mirror of an extinct GeoCities site.
A wingnut anti-tax site.
An atheist information site.
"Fashion Dolls Anonymous"
This "Automatic Intelligent Transportation" site oddly survived the shutdown (Archive.org cache just in case)
A relatively well-designed Buck Rogers fansite.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:21 PM on October 28, 2009
BeatlesNumber9.com is another mirror of an extinct GeoCities site.
A wingnut anti-tax site.
An atheist information site.
"Fashion Dolls Anonymous"
This "Automatic Intelligent Transportation" site oddly survived the shutdown (Archive.org cache just in case)
A relatively well-designed Buck Rogers fansite.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:21 PM on October 28, 2009
Best answer: A few days ago I screencapped a typical dead child memorial page on Geocities. Miscarriage and dead child memorial pages -- the majority to deceased and stillborn girls, it seemed -- were a staple of Geocities. With the disappearance of sites that allow users to easily create such memorials, I wonder if such forms of online grieving will fade away; I really don't see working-class Southern moms getting a domain name, hosting account and CMS to set up a memorial to a lost daughter.
posted by elmwood at 1:33 AM on October 29, 2009 [1 favorite]
posted by elmwood at 1:33 AM on October 29, 2009 [1 favorite]
A google search for the Icy Hot Stuntaz produces a lot of good stuff. They were, I think, the absolute worst GeoCities had to offer.
posted by timdicator at 6:45 AM on October 29, 2009 [1 favorite]
posted by timdicator at 6:45 AM on October 29, 2009 [1 favorite]
Best answer: FWIW, a lot of the impossibly long pages with excessive animated and airbrushed-style GIFs, unstoppable MIDI, awards galore, beveled tables nested on pages with different floral backgrounds, and generally glurgey themes and content (9-11 memorials, patriotism, bad poetry, memorials to dead and miscarried children, "survivors", country living, angels, unicorns and dragons, and so on) can still be found on Angelfire. A Google search for "Phenomenal Women of the Web" (a once-popular webring comprised almost solely of such sites) will reveal literally hundreds of still-existing examples of late 1990s uberglurge-style sites.
In fact, much like the Web 2.0 tutorials of today, I remember seeing sites offering instruction on how to create those long, glurge-filled pages of old. It really was a school of design, much like the Web 2.0 look is today.
A few glurgey pages I have bookmarked:
http://www.angelfire.com/stars2/MyAngelBabyDavid/index.html
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~ag477/Profile.html
http://www.serenitygarden.net/index.html
posted by elmwood at 1:19 PM on October 29, 2009 [1 favorite]
In fact, much like the Web 2.0 tutorials of today, I remember seeing sites offering instruction on how to create those long, glurge-filled pages of old. It really was a school of design, much like the Web 2.0 look is today.
A few glurgey pages I have bookmarked:
http://www.angelfire.com/stars2/MyAngelBabyDavid/index.html
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~ag477/Profile.html
http://www.serenitygarden.net/index.html
posted by elmwood at 1:19 PM on October 29, 2009 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by iamabot at 9:51 PM on October 28, 2009