Who mourns for Geocities?
Well, that’s it.
Yahoo!’s Geocities website-hosting service is, as of today, officially closed. With it closes at least a dozen Ultima website, including some project websites listed here at Aiera. I haven’t gone through the list yet and made adjustments, and I feel no small pang of regret that life got a wee bit too busy for me to make an earnest effort to save copies of those sites for preservation. I hope that others were able to do so.
In the meantime, let me re-iterate another offer I’ve perennially made: for those project developers who are suddenly sans-website and in need/want of a place to host their work, I can offer a free-of-charge subdomain here at Aiera with full FTP access, PHP 4 & 5, MySQL, and a fair chunk of free space.
Also, I rather like XKCD’s take/homage on the Geocities closure. Too classic:
[singlepic id=1 w=320 h=240 float=center]
I, for one, do mourn Geocities, for the following reasons:
1.) It was a major part of internet history, and thousands of old websites are now lost.
2.) Its sheer size means that a lot of information is now lost.
3.) Although a crappy hosting service, it was a first host for many web developers, including myself.
I have secured over thirty Ultima websites from Geocities, but probably missed a few. Try not to lose any Ultima-Geocities links, so that we can still track them using the Internet Archive. Send me any Ultima-Geocities links so that I can add them to my Ultima Web Database.
Valid points all, Dino. Geocities was where I built my first webpage as well, though admittedly there was crap-all for content thereat. Still, it’s a piece of history.
I will definitely forward you any relevant links that I trip over. I’m guessing that you were able to save the U6O website?
Yes, it’s one of over 30 Ultima websites that I saved. A few days ago I took a quick look at some pages at Aiera, and noticed that I unfortunately missed UltimarX10, but with some luck we may be able to recover it from the Internet Archive.
I wonder if someone has a copy of Micro Dragon’s website somewheres. I remember it being a hub and inspiration for the beginnings of my ultima projects back in the day.
I just hopped back here to mention something quite pertinent, in case anyone didn’t know… A fairly large group of people evidently got together and did the best they could to back up ALL of Geocities, which they’re now gradually restoring here:
http://www.reocities.com
Whoa…that’s a Herculearn undertaking! Or perhaps Sisyphean…I can’t decide.
Regardless, thanks for the update. I’ll keep an eye on affected project links and try them at the new site periodically.