The End of GeoCities

The day has finally arrived. Yahoo! GeoCities will officially shut their web hosting service on 26 October 2009. For many who grew up with the web in the 90s (talking about myself here) building a user-created homepage for topical communities on GeoCities was as close as it got to social networks. Those were the days before Twitter, before Facebook, before MySpace... even before Friendster!

My very 1st homepage was built on GeoCities, back in my poly days. Those were the days where we chucked along on a 486mhz computer and 56.6K modems had the fastest connection! You'd find my dude Kenny and myself at the computer stations building our websites on a Netscape browser with Notepad! Those 1st few lines of HTML codes... I remembered building portfolio pages featuring our trilogy animation "The Adventures of Coco & Molly". I really have to dig through my archives if I kept any of those web content. They've become very sentimental materials.

I went on to revamp my portfolio website (also on GeoCities) later in uni with a cleaner design in the now extremely dated "frames" structure.


Landing page of the portfolio website www.geocities.com/natashayong



Secondary pages of the porfolio website www.geocities.com/natashayong

In addition, while abroad in Australia, I also built a personal website for updates and pictures. The then method to keep in touch with friends and family.


Landing page of the Natasha Online website


Travel Log archive


Remembering the tedious methods of photo upload before sites like Flickr and Zooomr. Everything was done MANUALLY. PAGE BY PAGE!

When blogging emerged into the web scene, I adopted Blogger as an alternative web update platform in 2002. I remembered not liking the term "blog" very much and labeled my links "weblog". It was soon evident that my GeoCitites sites were to be neglected. However, they remained live.


Blogger site design


Blogger site revamp soon after I purchased my very own domain www.natashayong.com


Latest minimal Blogger site revamp with Web 2.0

Preparing to let the site "die" naturally by itself was a difficult process. There was a need to backup content and host them somewhere else. I didn't appreciate that there was no one button download feature to backup your entire website. It was a real pain and a total waste of time repeating my right-click save-as action hundreds of times! Perhaps it was intended to be tough as Yahoo! offered customers a direct export to their paid Yahoo! Web Hosting.

As long as I've had personal webpages online, I've never paid a cent for any hosting. With that thought also comes the fear that I live by the mercy of all these online services which guarantees you nothing, not even if you pay. I'm reminded again about constant backup.

As the saying goes, "All good things, must come to an end". It was good while it lasted. GeoCities - R.I.P.