Super Soaker Central

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8016211.stm

Many water gun websites are hosted on Geocities. I've always kept "digital archives" so I intend to download as many as possible in the meantime so nothing interesting is lost.

This really is the end of an era and it comes somewhat as a shock to me. I remember considering to use Geocities for hosting several years ago. I remember browsing Geocities when I was very young back in 1997 and 1998. I never thought Geocities would be given the axe though.

Not directed towards this community but if any other water gun site users see my post:

I suggest moving important files, etc. to a free host like tripod temporarily until you find a better place (since tripod only gives you 20MB of space in the free hosting option)
you can use the site builder or raw HTML

I didn't think yahoo would shut down such a popular feature either

It's probably the Google effect - Google Pages and GAE may be more attractive options to those who know about them. Social networking and cheap hosting has also made Geocities a less obvious option to new webmasters.

I remember seeing Geocities websites years ago, too, but I don't know exactly when. It was undoubtedly after you first saw it.

It does mark the end of an era - the end of an era when ordinary people made their OWN websites. Now everyone's using Facebook and Twitter and Blogger and so on. The web belongs to the big businesses. I mean sure Geocities was owned by Yahoo, but it was relatively discrete about it; Geocities sites (and similar) were always owned by their creators.

I've already started to archive some sites after hearing this sad news. I've downloaded quite a bit of ZOCCOZ's Water Gun Library, a favourite of mine, with the Firefox browser extension called 'Scrapbook'. It allows for really in-depth multi-level saving of websites, including flash elements, videos, etc. It's definitely superior to just clicking "Save Page As" which doesn't create a 1:1 backup.

Admittedly, most Geocities websites are embarrassing 90's relics and full of Pokemon and DBZ .gifs, but there are some treasure trove websites particularly for niche hobbies that contain info not found anywhere else on the web.

wierzbowski wrote:Admittedly, most Geocities websites are embarrassing 90's relics and full of Pokemon and DBZ .gifs...

And who said that's a bad thing?

Not that I particularly care about those things, but I do remember coming across a couple Pokémon pages back in the day; they weren't very useful but they're part of the Spiritus Mundi. "Treasure trove" describes them well. Sadly, there's actually a lot of apathy among these site owners, so I doubt many of them will save their sites even if they hear that Geocities is going down.

Then again, maybe Yahoo! will continue to let members download backups of their websites.

I'd hesitate to use the word 'apathy' - it has too many negative connotations. But many people stopped updating their sites ages ago. They've probably also forgotten their password, and no longer use the email that a password reset link would get sent to.

I think once Yahoo closes it they won't let anyone download the content except the FBI.

On another note,

http://www.geocities.com/k8mn_1999/K8MNpage5.html

Not my website, but a page I think is quite impressive.