Goodbye GeoCities…

Some months ago, Yahoo! announced that it will close GeoCities, one of its services. Today, the 26th October is the day. Nowadays, most people don’t even know what GeoCities is, but for me it is, or rather it was, something very special.

According to Wikipedia:

Yahoo! GeoCities is a web hosting service founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI).

In my case, it’s not only a ‘web hosting service’ because it introduced me to several things without the knowledge of which I wouldn’t be what I am today. Basically, it introduced me to the Internet. Yes, the Internet, the World Wide Web, the Information Superhighway (:P), however-you-want-to-call-it…

However, I won’t take the fact that it’s closing as a shot through the heart or anything like that; it’s completely useless in the Web 2.0 period and should have been improved or closed a long time ago. There are several services which are a million times better that it. For example Weebly or Moonfruit.

[Please not that I'm talking about the Mauritian situation in this article, the rest of the world might have been very different. I wasn't really into technology at that time and can't make conclusions about that. Please not that the internet has come to Mauritius relatively later than most countries, the 90's situation of the rest of the world is like the early 00's here.]

It started in 2005, when 64k dial-up was considered ‘damn cool’, people looked at you quizzically when you talked about something called ‘Google’, I actually used Yahoo! Mail for something other that receiving spam and everybody’s home page was Yahoo! (a.k.a. the Times Square of the Internet).

Bottom line: Yahoo! was in some ways what Google is today.

Back then, I was Saajid Vawda, a 12-year-old to whom ‘Social Networks’, ‘blogs’ and other geeky internet terms were unknown, not ‘sjdvda’, 16-year-old geek blogger addicted to the internet.  I didn’t even have a Hotmail address and hadn’t joined hi5.

I wanted to create a web page, and as I was some kind of Yahoo! fanboy, I chose GeoCities even though there were some better free web page publishing services (notably freewebs, now known as webs). It offered 15 mb web space, a little bandwidth, a free page builder and some other goodies. Not much for today’s standards, but at that time, when people here still used floppy disks, it wasn’t bad.

The following are among the many things I got from this once-great web service:

The origin of sjdvda

Most people use a nickname instead of their real name on the internet; here’s mine’s story:

I wanted to sign up for Yahoo! to create a web page and the aliases ‘saajid’, ‘vawda’, ‘svawda’ ‘saajidv’ and ‘saajidvawda’ were not available. I could have added a number after my name, but I hate numbers. I could also have used my full name ‘muhammadsaajidvawda’ but that was just ridiculous. Seriously, what kind of URL is ‘geocities.com/muhammadsaajidvawda‘? lol.

I was in a real fix and couldn’t think about something else, so I checked out the suggestions and among them was ‘sjdvda’. I chose it because it was short and really unique, albeit rather hard to remember.

That’s the origin of sjdvda. :)

HTML

Although GeoCities used a WYSIWYG editor called PageBuilder™, you could edit the HTML source of the page, and that’s how I knew about HTML. Before that, I dismissed it as one of those ‘complicated computer languages’ but after reading some tutorials, I found it rather easy to understand. I didn’t really start to write HTML until 2007, but GeoCities introduced me to this fantastic language who’s almost  as cool as English and way cooler than French. :P

Blogging and RSS Feeds

When I built my page, there was an option to add a Yahoo! 360 blog, so I added it. I didn’t even know what a blog was, some Googling Yahooing was needed and after reading some blog posts about blogging (:D), I grasped the concept. I sent an email to some relatives asking them to visit my site and tell me what they thought about it. Imagine the smile on my face when I received some positive and encouraging comments in the ‘guestbook’. Unfortunately, no one was visiting the blog and I gave up after 3 posts. :D I also learned about RSS Feeds in the process.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) I can’ insert some screenshots of the website because I deleted all the pages last year when I created my first blog.

I say “Goodbye GeoCities, I’ll remember you like people remember their first car or their first love. I’ll remember you, but I don’t need you anymore. I won’t miss you…” ;-) (I’m good at dramatic conclusions. :P)

So, what are the services that have influenced you people?

P.S. I wrote this article some months ago and was waiting for today to publish it. Right now, this would’ve been pretty much impossible as I’m in the middle of exams. :(