Before the rise of dynamic content management systems and inexpensive hosting services, the first age of self-publishing was spearheaded by hand-cobbled HTML pages on clunky hosted platforms. The greatest relic of that age disappears tomorrow.

As announced earlier this year, GeoCities closes down October 26. Sadly, this isn’t a decommissioning — this is a deletion. All those goofy homepages and their blinky GIFs will be permanently lost to history. If you’re one of the pioneers whose first efforts at online self-expression involved ridiculously cryptic subfolder hierarchies that mimicked the geographic limitations of the offline world, open your GeoCities account one last time and save what you can.

Perhaps if Yahoo had never acquired GeoCities and imposed its inability to innovate, the service that empowered many a plucky nineties geek could have evolved into something more powerful. Alas, we will never know.

Originally posted on October 25, 2009 @ 4:18 am