Today’s XKCD reminded me that Yahoo’s GeoCities web hosting service was closing its doors today, and taking the zillions of late ’90s- and early ’00s-era we pages offline forever.

I used GeoCities for my first two web sites: “Elephantitic Monkey” and “Stranded on the Edge of Infinity.” I made Elephantitic Monkey when I was still in high school, and Stranded the year after I graduated. They were awful looking sites, as you might expect, but they were badass at the time.

GeoCities’ PageBuilder was a drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG application that was a bitch to work with to build a web page, and an even bigger pain to update. Because I knew nothing coding at the time, anytime I updated the sidebar — where the navigation choices would be listed — I had to update every single page that had been previously made. After a couple months’ worth of content, this became a teeth-grindingly tedious and frustrating process. Eventually I had a friend who actually knew the back-end processes write up some HTML code for frames, which made the updating much, much simpler. I watched him come up with it in about five minutes, and it may as well have been in Cyrillic for all that I actually understood it. Of course, then a few months later, I abandoned Stranded in favor of the first incarnation of this here web site.

I didn’t archive either Elephantitic Monkey or Stranded, and I kind of wish I had, just so I could be nostalgic and mildly offended at the same time. A quick Google search doesn’t reveal any archived version of them, either. (Though it did bring up a result for a book entitled STRANDED: STORIES FROM THE EDGE OF INFINITY — how random is that?)

BUT — since I do keep copies of all the actual files of everything that was on those pages, I was able to go back and read some of the stuff that was on Stranded. I forgot how collaborative a site it really was. There were seven people contributing columns at one point, four or five people contributing short stories and poetry, and several people turning in photos and artwork. That’s pretty fucking cool, actually.

Part of me thinks that it would be intriguing to put together a similar community like that again. If I could come up with an easy enough way to design and maintain it — and find enough people willing to contribute to make it a worthwhile endeavor — I would. It’s certainly something to think about.