As I sit here, open on my laptop is a program called jEdit, and in it are several PHP documents. I'm working on a new backend to power any future websites that I make. I took some time out to go on Twitter, and I saw a trending topic that really hit home for me.
RIP GeoCities.
I remember when I first found GeoCities. I actually had difficulty signing up. I went with my buddy Dan - yes, former thinksobrain bassist Dan - to the local library after school. Hell, we had to be 15, 16 maybe. We looked at some websites - some that had song lyrics, some with guitar tabs, and one that pondered "Where the hell is Megadeth Arizona?" I decided, hell, I gotta get me one of these. How do I do it? So I did a Yahoo search - which was also new to me at the time - and it brought me to GeoCities.com. You sign up, you pick a neighborhood, pick a template, then type what you want to have appear on your website. Thus, my fascination with creating websites was born
I'm sure if I dig through enough boxes, I'll find a floppy disk that had my Metallica: Overload website files on it. Now there's a memory. I learned how to do HTML code from some guy on AOL, and my sites always got a little better over time, but they still felt like Geocities webpages. I, like many others, was not immune to spinning e-mail logos, "best viewed with Netscape Navigator" buttons, or the ever famous <blink> and <marquee> tags. Hell, one of my animated gifs from that old Metallica fan site I put together on Geocities served as the inspiration for my first tattoo - Metallica's "Scary Guy" logo.
Eventually, when I wanted my own domain name - joepac.net - I registered it and hosted it with GeoCities. Still looked like a GeoCities page. I only kept the domain for one year, because I think I realized how pointless it was to pay $10 a year for a website about me when I'm not really famous for anything. Which is why this site is on a subdomain of thinksobrain.com instead of being located at thinksojoe.com.
Eventually, I moved out of the GeoCities, learned PHP, CMS, and XHTML, and I started creating all of my own sites, starting with the oft-neglected stupid5pin.com, which I'd built from scratch using nothing but PHP and a few how-to eBooks. Now I run WordPress for mostly everything, but I'm still building sites with PHP for the hell of it (including the one you're reading now), but I seriously doubt that any of them - stupid5pin, boredwrestlingfan, any of them - would exist today if it weren't for GeoCities sparking my love of web design.
Thank you, GeoCities. You will be forever missed.
GeoCities
1995 - 2009
