GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet(cybercultural.com) |
GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet(cybercultural.com) |
In many ways, we've actually regressed over the past 30 years, to the point where people say that the average person couldn't even create their own page before Web 2.0. And the web has become much more homogenized as a result, and most of the platforms people gravitate to, starting with Web 2.0, went for quick throw away engagement instead of more thoughtful evergreen content.
And there was only so much to learn, too, at least as far as web development went-- not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database.
Today I think those types of nontechnical people are pursuing far more lucrative niches in product management, design, ux, marketing and stuff like that over basic webdev work.
It was likely a lot easier for most people than having to figure out how to do something in DOS (which was also pretty common at the time).
Aside: the first time I put some data in a database table, and built a page to display it in the browser is one of those head exploding moments from my life.
I'm pretty sure it was MS Access, classic ASP (there were... 4? objects total to learn?) and IIS Express.
I don't know. There are kids making games in Roblox now, editing movies and doing all kinds of things, but Hacker News would still consider them "nontechnical" because they have social media accounts.
A website that requires the user to write HTML code targets an audience that knows HTML. That's really all there is to it. But knowledge of HTML correlates extremely strongly with knowledge of CSS and JavaScript and a couple other internet basics, so it's not labeled “people who know HTML”, it's labeled “tech people”.
I ended up going to some other service (it may have been Tripod?) to host my page before we switched ISPs to one that gave you 2 MB of space.
As far as I can tell the "blocks" were never archived so they're missing from the internet archive. You can see the indexes of them here https://web.archive.org/web/19961221013557/http://www.geocit...
https://web.archive.org/web/19991001193925/http://www.geocit...
It was so exciting to find a new comment in your guestbook
It was plain text.
With a few pages eventually having an image and it was just stiff said about them in the original series, next generation and eventually ds9.
It was terrible but I miss the excitement of people getting in touch with the other details and episode references I had missed out or didn’t know about.
Of course, not for the content itself, but because it's really a time capsule of the feelings and hopes of our time, back then, when we were teens, discovering this new exciting thing called Internet, the excitement of meeting like minded people and have discussions that you could never have with your friends.
I feel like nothing is ever gonna replicate that excitement anymore, but that may be more related to us being 40+ than the technology not being available xD
Geocities/Lycos/others, then switching to phpbb forums that you modded and where you had your first programming experiences to try to build games...great innocent times all around, before everything was enshittified for commercial purposes.
I get a warm feeling looking through all these "home pages", they feel so much more genuine and personal than anything found on modern social media.
- [0] geocities.com/Colosseum/Loge/3484, I’ll always remember the URL. It was a Detroit Red Wings slash Jimi Hendrix slash Smashing Pumpkins slash Star Wars fan page I made in 7th grade. I just kept putting more stuff on there.
When I made some awful website with stolen pictures and a lot of awful colors that didn't match (with of course a bright lime green background, obviously), I needed a place to publish my code, and that book recommended Geocities at the very end, and I did. No one ever really went to my site outside of supportive friends and relatives, but it was still a lot of fun to talk to the other kids at my school and brag about how I had my own website. Keep in mind, this would have been around ~1999-2000, I would have been about 8-9 years old. This was before everyone had a MySpace; the fact that I had a website was considered "kind of cool". I thought it was anyway.
I loved GeoCities. I miss the world when everyone had their own awful web pages. Social media made things more approachable, and is in most ways better, but I think something is lost in the centralization of everything.
[1] https://a.co/d/4AYuTSx not a referral link or anything.
That idea seems to be coming back.
Geocities inspired site available today.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445618
> With this launch, and our recently deployed 11-datacenter global anycast caching CDN, Neocities becomes a world-class web hosting service, proving you can still make building a web site fun and easy without sacrificing performance, and without being forced to figure out how to use esoteric, expensive cloud services.
https://blog.neocities.org/blog/2017/03/26/huge-space-increa...
I thought it was so cool that I could add the little counter for the number of visits to the bottom. Been a while since I’ve seen one of those on a website.
At this point I was working in an Internet startup building client-side side tools.
GeoCities did one thing really well, building pages on the Web. All you needed was a browser. Innovative.
Compare this to downloading, then installing software on a Win95 box. Work on some markup, FTP the HTML, graphics, stylesheets to the server. A hint to the future you’d see in 2003 with WP. [1]
Reference
[1] Wordpress, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
It's basically a geocities simulator where you play as a moderator
We had a tool called the "fleshfinder" that looked for accounts with lots of images and then lots of those images had lots of flesh tones, and would dump them into a moderation queue where we human pornzappers would glance over the images and then press a button to terminate their account or mark it as within terms of service.
My first was 1999 in Florida. Dude had a shop selling jewelry on eBay. His autistic brother (not kidding, dude's brother LOVED computers and our first conversation was him telling me how to deal with himself). Very introspective but really cool guy to get to know.
The owner had a small team of Vietnamese jewelers working in the shop to make and customize jewelry. There was no scamming going on. I had to work on photography of new items and to update the eBay listings. If a customer had a problem with the jewelry they received, we would correct it for free and send it back.
The downside is that despite running a legit business, the owner was an asshole and just kept kicking out one employee after another. Including half the jewelry team.
After a few months I even quit because he just started randomly bitching and physically threatening me because the focus on a couple pieces of jewelry was slightly off. Easily a 10 minute fix.
My last day when he did this again I told him to fuck off and I was out. I still vividly remember him physically spitting from his mouth on my driver side window as I rolled it up as a pulled away.
Now that I think about it, fuck you Jeremiah. Like, 9 fucks to wherever and back. You had somehow built a really good business early on and completely fucked it up just by being yourself. It's been 26 years, but seriously fuck you. I hope your brother finally got the help he needed and you clearly were not providing.
Good times, those were.
I learned more about bingo and reservation culture, language, and society over that few days than I had in my entire life. Vastly enhanced my understanding of Letterkenny.
I'm pretty angry with a lot of what Yahoo did. It's very idealistic to frame it in words like this but it's almost like "Companies should be owned by people who have a strong understanding of what makes a company valuable, its users"
So I see this as an early mistake that snowballed into the cesspool that is the modern web. Things would've been very different, possibly for the better, if we had web publishing tools that were equally as user friendly as the web browser was in those early days.
The original WorldWideWeb browser released in 1991 did have support for WYSIWYG editing of documents, but was quickly overtaken by Mosaic, which was read-only. It would be interesting to know why this feature was abandoned and not iterated upon. The Wikipedia article[2] mentions this:
> The team [at CERN] created so called "passive browsers" which do not have the ability to edit because it was hard to port this feature from the NeXT system to other operating systems.
That could be a hint, but it doesn't explain why NCSA didn't implement it in Mosaic.
WebDAV came out a few years later in 1996, but it never really took off. It was seen more as an alternative to FTP, than a native web feature. Why did it fail? Why wasn't it adopted by web browsers? Konqueror seems to have been the only one.
Much later in 2009 Opera launched Unite, a web server inside the browser, which seemed really promising at the time. But it was also quickly discontinued. At that point it might've been too little, too late.
And now we have Web3 and the decentralized movement, and even TBL is trying to undo the damage with Solid. But I have little hope any of these projects will see mainstream adoption. The modern web has too much traction, and the average web user doesn't care enough about their data to change their habits, even if the tools were simple to use.
Anyway, this is possibly too tangential for a thread on GeoCities, but I'm curious if anyone here has more information about this early history of the web. I would love to know TBL's perspective about all of this.
https://web.archive.org/web/19961022173343/http://www.geocit...
Cloudhiker kind of fills the niche but it just isn't the same.
The phrase "stumble across" made me think of StumbleUpon. And StumbleUpon made me think of HN.
I think we still have serendipity, but there's almost always some implicit popularity or recommendations filter. Hard to sample uniformly at random from the internet. And there doesn't seem to be a ton of demand for that, either.
Probably the best argument for readers sampling uniformly at random is actually on the supply side. It'd be better if content wasn't so optimized for popularity.
one of the first things you had to do when putting up a page on geocities or tripod, or any other host was head over to cooltext.com and design your new logo!
Another fun aspect of all this is all their neighborhoods had unpaid "community leaders". The hot neighborhoods got tons of leaders so your in was to pick an "up and coming" neighborhood and apply to be a leader there. All the neighborhoods had themes and rules which the community leaders enforced but they weren't strictly enforced. When GeoCities IPO'd, they threw all their community leaders a few pre-IPO shares and swag, which was super fun and appreciated as a high school student. :)
I suspect the reasons why it never caught on were much simpler. Most of the early adopters were very enthusiastic, wanted to contribute, and there were many niches where one could contribute something new. Then there is the whole issue of design, which makes publishing on the web a relatively high effort proposition. Even with GUI editors, it is much closer to desktop publishing than word processing. The former never really caught on outside of professional work because it is high effort. Blogs and wikis are more popular, with the effort being closer to word processing. Yet even that is a bit much, given that the very low effort social media seems to be dominant these days.
Then there are things like hosting. Hosting has always been easy to find, but it is harder to find something stable across time. And discoverability, which has always been an issue but at least centralized services mitigate some of that. And the whole social angle, which instantly makes it more complex to setup and manage.
Sure, but early web pages were quite rudimentary. A simple tool that allowed adding links and images would have been enough to start with. Later when scripting and styling were standardized, it could've evolved to support those features as well. WYSIWYG HTML editors did this relatively well, but they never solved the more difficult task of actually publishing and serving the content. The best they would do is offer file syncing over FTP, but actually setting up the web server, DNS, etc., was left to the user.
An entire industry of web builders and hosters appeared to fill this void. Services like GeoCities and Tripod were early iterations, and today we have Wix, Squarespace, Wordpress, and countless others. All social media platforms are essentially an offshoot of this, enabling non-technical users to publish content on the web. This proves that it can be done in a user friendly way, but the early web tooling simply didn't exist to empower the user to do this for themselves.
Imagine if instead of using a web browser, consuming web content consisted of a command-line tool to download files from a server, and then opening them up separately in other tools to view them. I love cURL and tools like it, but the reality is that this experiment would have never become mainstream if we didn't have a single tool that offered a cohesive and user friendly experience. This is a large reason why Mosaic was as popular as it was. It really brought the web to the masses.
> Then there are things like hosting. Hosting has always been easy to find, but it is harder to find something stable across time. And discoverability, which has always been an issue but at least centralized services mitigate some of that. And the whole social angle, which instantly makes it more complex to setup and manage.
Sure, but I think those problems would've been solved over time. We see them as difficult today because we always relied on large companies to solve them for us. Instead of search indexers that crawled the web, why couldn't we rely on peer-to-peer protocols instead? DNS was an established protocol at the time that already was highly distributed. The internet itself is distributed. Why couldn't discoverability on the web work in a similar way?
The WWW proposal mentions this point:
> The automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available. This is essential for news articles, but is very useful for any other material.
This sounds very similar to RSS. So there were early ideas in this direction, but they never solidified. Or if they did, it was too late to gain any traction.
Today the decentralized/federated movement is proof that this _can_ work. Imagine if we had protocols and tools like that from the very beginning. My argument is that the reason we have the highly centralized web of today is because we lacked simple web authoring early on. Non-technical users would have learned to use these tools just as they learned how to use the web browser. Our collective mindset of what the web is and how to participate in it would be built on collaborative instead of consumerist ideals. We would still need some centralized services, of course (e-commerce would still exist), but it wouldn't be for simple things such as publishing content. I even think that the grip of the advertising industry would be far weaker, since they wouldn't be able to profit as much from our personal data. Users would have far more control over their data and privacy. Propaganda and mass psychological manipulation in general wouldn't be as prevalent as they are today.
But maybe all of this is wishful thinking by a jaded mind. :)
document.designMode = 'on'
i think the bigger challenge was highly available hosting. there were authoring tools aplenty.
Back then even throwing up a colored background and marquee text was sorta thrilling. I remember people put so much effort even to basic shit like their AOL profiles back in 1999 and that sorta bled into the personal website scene. But really for me I think it was tools like html and geocities that enabled this.
But where is that today? Python beginner webdev stuff? Can you really get into that feedback loop by messing around with flask and elixir? I guess it must work for some people but I look out at the web today and most of what I see is SEO garbage. Definitely not 100 flowers blooming, but one ugly google-kudzu blanketing the entire thing.
This kickstarted webdev for me too. I remember the moment exactly.
Maybe the inflection point was the transition between Windows XP and Windows Vista. In XP, the default behavior was to show file extentions in Windows file explorer. In subsequent Windown releases, file extentions for known file types were hidden by default. This led to future generations being less capable of identifying common file formats. Computer illiteracy has been snowballing ever since.
https://www.brainbell.com/tutors/A+/Hardware/Managing_Files_...
I'm still not convinced that would have helped maintain a decentralized web. For one thing, such tools existed very early on. I seem to recall WYSIWYG HTML editors with integrated FTP support being common. Many ISPs also included web hosting, which would have taken care of the web server and DNS part. While such a setup wasn't decentralized, it was certainly less centralized than the web today. I simply think the number of people who are interested in typing more than a paragraph or two at a time is quite limited. In that case, the effort is minimal and the tools required to support it can be quite simple (e.g. there is very little need to deal with formatting, creating links to other pages, etc.).
> Imagine if instead of using a web browser, consuming web content consisted of a command-line tool to download files from a server, and then opening them up separately in other tools to view them.
That pretty much reminds me of Gopher. And you're right. Just look at how quickly the web took over.
>> Hosting has always been easy to find, but it is harder to find something stable across time. > Sure, but I think those problems would've been solved over time. We see them as difficult today because we always relied on large companies to solve them for us.
In a sense, you're right. Self-hosting wasn't an option for many people in the early days since they had ephemeral dial-up connections. So you had to rely upon someone else, which meant that there was a good chance you would have to "move" (e.g. changing ISPs in the ISP provided web hosting, or simply changing web hosting providers). Aside from reliability, security, dynamic IPs, and cranky ISPs, there are no barriers to self-hosting today. Most of those can be overcome with existing software. I simply don't think there is much demand for such software these days, which is why it is uncommon.
> But maybe all of this is wishful thinking by a jaded mind. :)
There is nothing wrong with hopeful thinking. Your suggestions are even valuable in the current context since there are people who are interested in building and hosting webpages in a decentralized manner. While a simple tool would revolutionize the lives for those people, I'm going to stick by my doubts about it revolutionizing the web.
HTML editors with FTP support were quite common, yes. As well as free hosting, though my memory is spotty regarding how user friendly ISP hosting was specifically. I came online in the late 90s, so I missed this early era, and I don't remember my ISP offering this service.
Regardless, these services and software came after the functionality of the web was already established (Prodigy, 1994; Geocities, 1994; FrontPage, 1995; Dreamweaver, 1997). They were essentially a response to a demand for features the web didn't natively have. By that point Mosaic was the most popular browser, and Netscape and IE were starting to dominate. The idea that the web was a read-only medium meant for consumption had already gained momentum. Even back then relatively few people bothered to figure out how to build their own site. Many non-technical people did, and these services and software did help, but by and large most users were consumers.
> I simply think the number of people who are interested in typing more than a paragraph or two at a time is quite limited.
The current state of the web negates this opinion. Most people do indeed want to share their thoughts and ideas. Social media platforms were created essentially to enable everyone to communicate, to publish and discover content, regardless of their technical knowledge. A _ton_ of content is created by non-technical users, which now vastly dominates the content available on the web. Think only of the millions of hours of video uploaded to YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
So it's not that people aren't interested in creating content, but that the only places they can easily do so is on platforms created and maintained by large companies.
I'm not saying that we might not have needed centralized services of this kind even if we had native web publishing from the start. But imagine if the software used to access the web had the same simple UI as Twitter or Facebook, but instead of being a centralized service, it was available locally directly in the browser (or "publisher", or however we would've called it). That would've certainly reduced the friction to contribute, lowering the need for 3rd party services and software to be created for filling that void, and the web would've evolved much differently.
Perhaps we would've invented P2P protocols like BitTorrent much earlier, to address the need of sharing large volumes of data. Perhaps the demand for higher connection speeds would've accelerated the migration to broadband. Who knows, and we can only speculate at this point.
> Aside from reliability, security, dynamic IPs, and cranky ISPs, there are no barriers to self-hosting today.
I disagree. It's still largely a task for technical users. A non-technical person would still struggle to setup their own web server that serves their own content, despite how ubiquitous cloud hosting providers are, and how user friendly web servers have become (Caddy et al.). Doing that on their home networks is even more challenging, because of the issues you mentioned. User friendly web serving software and network infrastructure is uncommon precisely because there's no demand for it, because the problem is solved by large companies. It's a chicken and egg scenario.
> While a simple tool would revolutionize the lives for those people, I'm going to stick by my doubts about it revolutionizing the web.
Yeah, I don't think there's a chance anything will change now. That ship has already sailed. The decentralized movement is much larger today than it's ever been, yet decentralized services are only used by a very niche group of internet users. I don't think that architecture will ever replace the existing web. I just wish we would've enabled and educated users from the start that the web is a collaborative medium, not one controlled by corporate interest. At least I think that was TBL's vision, which he's now trying to realize with Solid. I wish them and projects like it the best of luck, but I think it's too little and too late to undo the mistake.
Cheers for the discussion! :)