Geocities, In Memoriam
Geocities has shut down. I can’t imagine the service has seen much activity in recent times, even with the Yahoo acquisition. I abandoned it not longer after it became obvious how cheaply you could build and host your own domain. Geocities does hold some sentimental value. In the early days of the web it was a magnificent idea. It was certainly responsible for nurturing my interest in web design — or rather, design in general — and nudging a good number of people into learning basic HTML. In its prime, I was running a half dozen different sites in different neighborhoods.
Perhaps the first and longest running however was a fan page I built dedicated to Pink Floyd. There were earlier iterations, but one in particular stuck and remained live at http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/6120/floyd.html for a number of years. The earliest record I see in the guestbook for the site (preserved at the internet archive) is 19 August, 1997. I was sixteen years old, writing code and pasting sites together in Adobe Pagemill.
Distortion Clouds? Check. Outer Glow? Check. Copperplate Gothic? Check. The Outer Bevel effect was probably created with Kai’s Power Tools.
Simpler times, it seems.