What is Geocities like

[KiwiMeowo]

Before 2023, I never heard of Geocities or Neocities, and definitely never experienced how the Indie Web operates during the golden age of Geocities. While I have been using Neocities for a while, I am not very familiar with how Geocities works.

The impressions I have about the older web hosting website is "good ol' nostalgic times" from the older generations or "the very cool aesthetic" from the younger generations. I also checked out some Geocities websites from the archives. However, I really want to know the experience of coding a website in the old days, like how different is it now?

For example, are there less html tags back then? How difficult is it to learn html? Do websites load slower? I am very curious

[Capybara]

I had a Geocities in middle and high school, it was a pretty basic free host. It's actually pretty similar to Neocities in the sense it was a static host and you could type right into an editor. Most Geocities sites were pretty barebones though? People who used free hosts back in the 00s were mostly considered beginners or "lame" and people who owned domains or had dynamic .php sites were the "cool" ones lol.

[milo]

Haha I definitely remember the sense that Geocities pages were kinda "lame". Someone I knew had a super neat website with a slick layout involving cherry blossom leaves and she paid for a .net domain and I really looked up to her as far as site making went.

I also used Geocities in middle school as I was learning to browse the web. I made my "really cool Sonic fan page" as I called it where I just uploaded pictures and videos I had downloaded from other places on the web. It basically let you set a home page and then add pages and link to them really easily. And yeah, if you knew basic HTML you could code up your own pages, but they also offered premade templates and themes to use. You'd go to all sorts of different websites and could tell they used Geocities because they were using a Geocities theme.

[xwindows]

I made my GeoCities site in my grade school's computer lab; it was an assignment in technology class. The year was 2002, I think; the lab computers were running Windows 98 (not XP yet), and the site was already called Yahoo GeoCities at that time-- so I was instructed to sign up for a Yahoo account to be able to use it.

GeoCities I used was a meager 2 MiB website space, for static website only, managed solely via web interface (no FTP or any other form of upload). When the uploaded page was served, Yahoo would inject their own advertisement onto it as well; at the bottom, if I remembered correctly. It was no longer using "neighborhood" designation anymore in that era (1), so I got a semi-vanity URL path that I could choose, stemmed from geocities.com (2), assigned to your web space.

I did not remember the URL or what my GeoCities site was about anymore, sorry; but I don't think it was anything substantial.

are there less html tags back then?

Back then, W3C HTML 4.01 was "hot off the press"; but we did not actually know or care much about it per-se; see below...

How difficult is it to learn html?

I really want to know the experience of coding a website in the old days, like how different is it now?

For context: it was the age where the personal computers were not... personal. Households (mine included) would commonly share a single PC. In grade school, there was no computer in library for student to use (0), and we would only have a chance to use one in technology class, where we would be escorted from our normal classroom to a dedicated computer lab filled with PCs-- enough for everyone in the class to be assigned with one.

The only "development tool" me and my classmates had for building webpages was just Notepad (yes, seriously). Graphics tools made available to us were just Microsoft Paint (which back then could only save in Windows Bitmap) and (*gasp*) Microsoft GIF Animator; so naturally, most graphics used in our GeoCities sites were pre-made ones borrowed from various locations of the interwebs, including those GIF collection sites which we were taught about.

"Learning" HTML comprised of teacher showing us example HTML page skeleton, pointing where was the title, where was the body; including various snippets of code that do various things, like link, image, color, background, with how/where to replace text/filename stuff to make it do the thing we wanted (think MelonLand's BBCode cheat sheet, but HTML). Not really difficult, I would say.

Other than that, we are left to experiment putting things together, view it in browser, tweak things up, rinse and repeat until presentable. We are also instructed to use View Source command on pages we found interesting, and try to use that as example to imitate (read: as sources to borrow from). Not a single book was involved in the entire process; it was more like digital playground rather than sitting through a lecture.

We did not care about (and had not even heard of) HTML validation; if a browser displayed the page in an okay way, that was considered good to go. If I remembered correctly, we were using Internet Explorer at school at the time (version 4 or 5, I'm not sure; but definitely not 6).

The teacher also taught about those novelty script files, which when applied on the page, would cause snow to fall inside, making background a twinkling starry sky, or making trails of objects to follow the mouse; those sort of "kitsch" stuffs. I didn't know jack about JavaScript at that time, so my interactions with them in the code were solely following an instruction to apply them on my GeoCities site.

In term of site organization, we were taught in the term of "upload file here, with this name; and once you type this location into the browser, that file would display". The concept about files, directories (folders), and volumes (drives) in a computer were taught in-class a year before; but the detailed concept of networking, protocol, and URL wasn't formally taught to me until middle school.

Speaking of files, those years were still in the period of floppy disk's reign: the High Density 3.5-inch 1.44 MB diskette (5.25-inch diskettes disappeared before that age); so my parents gave me one for storing files I made or downloaded during these lessons. Buying a brand-new diskette would have costed me around one meal, so I only had that single one in that age. Every school machines had 3.5-inch floppy drives. They got CD-ROM drives too-- but these were read-only CD drives not applicable for this file-transfer use.

Files from that era that which I still managed to keep and semi-regularly use to this day are MIDI files of popular songs in my country; which we were taught in-class about websites which offer these stuff for download. I didn't use these in my GeoCities site though, I wasn't told how; so I didn't have chance to annoy any poor unfortunate soul who stumbled upon my website with background music.


(0) And no OPAC or any form of electronic search; books were searched by hand-- on-shelf or by index cards. But there was that one computer the librarian used for circulation tracking task, and another one tracking student's entry. I have only experienced self-service electronic search since middle school.

(1) The grade-school!me briefly wondered why it was even called "Geo"Cities too, but I didn't think much about that at a time. I only found out why when I re-discovered the concept of vernacular web in 2020, and read about it in retrospect... nearly 20 years later.

(2) I didn't remember whether it was a subdomain or subdirectory, sorry.

[xwindows]

(Continued from the last post...)

Do websites load slower?

Waiting 2-4 minutes for a website to load (or to fail) was considered normal back then, and it was relatively common for some elements in the webpage to fail loading in the first try; and user had to use right click menu to manually retry each element to see them if he wanted to. Websites back in those days had to be robust to be usable at all.

Back then was an age of 56 kbits/sec dial-up in my area, with an effective download rate of 2-4.5 KiB/sec max from home (3); and my household had to pay for the phone bill of the entire duration of usage, on top of ISP's internet access fee. (ISP and phone company were also different companies) Also, I would have to tell everyone in my home that the modem was in-use, so they'd know to avoid picking up any telephone handsets; because if someone did... it would instantly nuke my Internet connection (4), interrupt everything I was downloading (if any), and I would have to spend another full minute to reconnect.

And did I tell you yet that continuation of interrupted downloads wasn't a feature of regular browsers back then, and I would have to download files in such fashion using a separate download manager-- such as a nagware GetRight?

Anyway, from what I understood, my school used leased-line Internet; but it was like... 1 Mbits/sec link shared throughout the entire school, probably including their servers too; so it didn't really feel any faster.

Tangent:
I remembered that the first browser I have seen being used on my home computer was Netscape Navigator; then we switched to Opera (5) for some years (version 6 or 7, I didn't remember exactly; but the most striking thing I remembered about it was how detailed its progress bar was) before switching to Internet Explorer. We would then switch to Opera again several years later (with me in my middle school) in its 9.x series, around the time that we adopted (Firefox 2.x) as our side-browser. Opera stayed our main browser until that entire lineage of Opera was discontinued after Opera 12; the point which Opera Software switched to rebadging Chrome(ium).

Side note:

good ol' nostalgic times

Despite already having some exposure to the Internet since late-90s, the Internet period I remembered fondly was rather the late 2000s era (roughly late 2006 to 2009), which was the first few years of general-public ADSL availability in my country.

As sites were still designed to accommodate dial-up and didn't yet manage to bloat up that much, browsing from a 256 kbits/sec ADSL connection truly felt like surfing Internet for the first time. Instead of click-wait-and-pray for however-long; count 15 down to 0 and the first bit of the next page would already be visible on the screen. With breezing-speed of 14-22 KiB/sec effective downloaded rate (7), detached from an actively-billed phone call, and become available all the time, I no longer felt guilt from using it.

It was only from that point, that a role of Internet and World Wide Web in my life changed from a novelty which I'd be lucky to use once a week, to a part of everyday life. The great time lasted for a while, before social-control media started to destroy the World Wide Web in early/mid-2010s.

History/retrospect note:
For not-rich someone, the only practical kind of web hosting back in early 2000s was shared hosting. There was no renting a "VM" (VPS), because machines back then wasn't powerful enough and CPU instruction for hardware-accelerating virtual machines wasn't a thing yet, so everything had to be done on bare-metal. The only "upgrade" possible from shared hosting realm in that era were either:

• Signing up for a very-pricey enterprise-level 1 Mbits/sec leased-line Internet (6) from an ISP near you to connect a server in your basement/office to the world; or...
• Lease a very-pricey drawer (read: rack) space in a datacenter operated by an ISP near you, to stuff your own (purchased separately and pricey) specialized pizzabox-like server computer there to connect and serve directly to a "high speed" 10 Mbits/sec uplink to local Internet exchange; a practice called "equipment colocation".

(3) Every so often, the modem would also fail to negotiate up to its 56 kbits/sec maximum speed, and stuck at 33 kbits/sec. The web browsing would still be... okay-ish, but downloading file in that condition (1-2 KiB/sec effective download rate) was something I would like to avoid.

(4) In later years, there were newer dial-up modem models which could tolerate off-hook phone; and my home PC was upgraded to use that.

(5) This is not the same as the thing called "Opera" browser these days. Back then, Opera used their own page rendering engine (called "Presto" since Opera 7) and their own JavaScript runtime; and it was even functioning as an entire Internet suite rather than just browser: with browser, feed reader (a real one, not just a links-listing aggregator that Firefox used to have), mail client, newsreader, IRC client, and even BitTorrent download manager. Progress bar (when enabled) was very detailed, and its GUI-based customizability was also superb-- you could configure virtually everything without monkeying with `about:config` or configuration file, and it even came with built-in style overlay function with dozens of stock style sheets (user-addable), as well as session save/restore/recovery function; no add-on needed.

Today's "Opera" however, stemmed from the need to keep up with the HTML/MovingGoalpost (and many related specifications) which have been moving at breakneck speed after W3C signed the deeds over to the Web Oligarchs (read: WHATWG). Without unlimited amount of money to burn, they had to abandon their own stuff and piggyback on Chrome(ium) development for the core of their "new" browser, called Opera Next at the time; which now become just "Opera", while original Opera became a discontinued Opera Classic which faded into the history. The functionalities and configurabilty of the new "Opera" wasn't even half of the old one.

And it wasn't even Opera alone that threw in the towel: Microsoft did as well, with their Internet Explorer (together with its Trident rendering engine), and turn to make Chrome(ium)-rebadge called Edge. Firefox haven't yet, because Google give monies to keep them afloat; in order to dodge US-FTC's monopoly investigation. It is so bad to the point that it has been a commonly accepted fact that re-implementing "modern browser" from ground-up become a fool's errand, for nearly a decade now.

This is a cautionary tale of how harmful of the constantly-changing technical specifications with extreme scope-creep are. I refuse to call these specifications "standard"; and swear by the last properly-versioned ones (HTML 4.01, CSS 2.1) when designing/writing my pages instead.

(6) This still exist today in a slightly branched-out form called "dedicated Internet", delivered via fiber optic, with full bandwidth and (usually 99.7%+) uptime guarantee in the contract. Still pricey, but not as uber-pricey as leased lines were in the old days. Businesses that still have on-premise servers these days would use this kind of Internet connection to run their servers.

(7) It is the lowest speed that I would personally consider to be a "broadband" Internet, and is a speed which I still accommodate when making websites today.

[Eunice]

I don't know that my generation thought that people with their own domains and hosting were "cool", more that they were lucky. Domains cost a lot in those days, even .com was out of the reach of a lot of people. And if you lived outside the USA it was virtually impossible to buy a domain as the banks would slap on a hefty currency conversion charge. But then came paypal, bless 'em! And domains were coming down in price. My sister bought me my first one, serennau.co.uk, for my birthday in 1999. I had it pointed to my Geocities site, until I discovered cheapish hosting in the UK.