It’s hard to shed a tear for the demise of GeoCities, even though I should as it started my web design career.  It’s difficult to mourn that which is long-forgotten, though – it’d be like becoming upset about for my cat who died years ago.

The truth is that I once had a GeoCities site, but all I recall about it was that the background was black, the URL was impossible to remember, the web FTP interface was unbelievably bad even for those days, and they had some Javascript that stuffed a shuddering GeoCities logo into the bottom-right corner.  I have no idea what it was actually about, and slipping peacefully away into history is the best thing for it.

The Archive Team are to be applauded for their efforts, though.  They’ve rescued all the under construction GIFs that they could possibly find and whacked them on one eye-bleeding page for posterity.  I haven’t seen so much irritating crap in one place since I was last in a Starbucks, so naturally I picked out a few of my faves and archived them here too, y’know, just in case…

“More updates to come once I’m back from primary school”

“Who turned out the lights?”

Nothing says class like a 3D rotating construction sign (with only one side)

Nothing says “we’re not quite sure what we’re archiving” like saving ancient Javadoc .gifs for posterity

Hey, quit ruining my childhood memories!

This is just a little bit like that Catchphrase episode.

I seriously have absolutely no idea what is meant to be going on here.

Believe it or not, this was actually about as reliable as Mac OS 9 dialogs got in my experience.

Achtung!  Awful designen!

Actually, I know a couple of people who could use this.