I’m feeling kinda of weird this morning. It feels like an old friend just died from my internet childhood.

I picked up a tweet from @mashable overnight linking to this article announcing the pending closure of Geocities. Strange that I did not receive the email myself, as I thought my account was still live with Yahoo, anyway…

Geocities was creating web communities and social media years before the term was dreamt up. People were blogging, they just didn’t realise, because it wasn’t called that yet. It was the age of personal homepages, the dawn of citizen journalism, manifested in clumsy attempts at HTML 1.0 sites.

I can still remember my unbounded joy at discovering you could use invisible tables to improve the layout of your webpages. A scanner was an expensive luxury in those days, so much of the user generated web was still text. The next mind blowing innovation? Getting stuff to move on your page thanks to animated gif’s – wow, just wow!

Now it all seems so childishly naive, but I’m now in full nostalgia mode harking back to halcyon, pre ad banner days, all delivered over my faithful US Robotics 9.8k dial up modem. 56k is coming you say, how will we ever fill the bandwidth?  lol

Anyhow before I slip into a sepia coated coma, my proudest web 1.0 treasure is embedded as a tribute to Geocities. My early lame attempt at a music website, for the band The Rose of Avalanche won a Geocities “Sunset Strip” featured page award in something like 1996. Sunset Strip was the music community section of Geocities.

R.I.P. Geocities, and all that sailed on her…