Monday, April 27, 2009

Geocities, soon to be RIP

My life is over.

OK, not really. But my internet life is turning a corner.

Back in 1998 a fellow moved into my building who brought with him... a computer, and in the computer was...a modem. And with that modem came...the internet.

And my life was over. Instead of drawing my comics, or looking for auditions to go to, I started surfing the internet, looking for wabsites about my various interests, downloading pictures, following links, and more.

Then I found Geocites.com.

Wow! I can have my own website! For free! I soon found other free website servers, Freeservers, Xoom.com, etc, but none had so user-friendly an interface and as warm and fuzzy a sense of "community." You picked a "city" based on the content of your site, and were assigned a choice of "streets" and "addresses." Then you could see what other websites were on the street to find other websites of similar interests. I chose "Athens," and of my choice of streets, I selected "Styx/3301" because the name sounded cool and the number was similar to the address I grew up on. You can still see the original homepage I built at http://www.geocities.com/zorikh/home.html.

In time I discovered that the amount of space you got on Geocities was far, far less than what I needed for what I wanted to put up. I was posting pictures of the Pennsic War, pages of my comic art, my acting resume, lists of medieval movies with Amazon.com links, SCA armor resources, promotions for shows I was in, stuff about my father, CJP LaCoudre, pages of the Amazing Grendel Conspiracy, my pictures of the 9-11 attacks, the French Army in World War II, and keeping an on-line journal, years before "blogging" became so last year. So I started several new Geocities websites for each of my various interests.

Now it seems that later this year it will all go "poof!" You know, I had, from time to time, wondered about the permanence of on-line content. So much of today's culture, and so much of my life only exists in electronic format, a good EMP will detroy it all, like an electronic burning of the library at Alexandria.

3 comments:

Leshock Arts Blog said...

I was going to suggest Google Pages, but they're no longer accepting new free accounts. :/ There has to be another way, Z.

Captain Zorikh said...

I guess NetZero's old ads were wrong. The internet was never meant to be free.

Leshock Arts Blog said...

I know it sucks, but the best thing you could do right now is to hunt down an archiving program so that you don't lose your content.

You could also create PDFs of your favorite pages, but that would be a real pita.

Best of Luck, Z. I don't want to see you lose your stuff either. Worse comes to worse, your content may end up on the Wayback Machine.

Hugs!!!