It was with a twinkle of nostalgia that I read about
the demise of GeoCities today. It's not like I've even logged into a Yahoo account for at least eight years, but that's not the point. It's like finding out that your favourite childhood playground's been bulldozed, or that your mum's sold your train set... you may not want to play with it anymore, but the fact that it's gone makes you feel gutted and, well... a bit old.
Like many an internet nerd, GeoCities was where I learnt to make websites. Ok, I'll admit that they weren't very good websites, but we all have to start somewhere...
When I was sixteen, there was no Facebook or Myspace and hosting your own advert-free website cost a small fortune. Instead, the internet consisted of forums and chat rooms and weirdos and endless midnight chats on ICQ with pretty much complete strangers and 'BRB' while I'd go and make another coffee so I could stay up all night making my 'homepage'. 'About what?', you may ask.
About myself, of course! I was not remotely interesting, but everyone else had a homepage about what music they liked, who they loved and generally how angsty they were. Very much like Myspace, actually!
This abundance of apparent pretention that
anyone out there cared if you listened to Fiona Apple and could quote bits of
Heathers verbatim
was also coupled with a lack of understanding of privacy, my own safety and a general flouting of copyright and libel laws.
Plagiarism abounded, as did crappy prose, white text on black backgrounds, tiled backgrounds, marquee text and blinky animated gifs, all of which I hope -for everyone's sake - are long buried along with GeoCities when it goes.
However, for all the rubbish that proliferated our numerous homepages, the late 90s and early 00s were exciting times for someone discovering the internet and realising that the world extended further than one's crappy little northern town.
And it wasn't a completely misspent youth. From making sites on GeoCities and sharing them with people on the other side of the world, I learnt what looked good and what didn't, about standard fonts, web safe colours and so on. I learnt HTML and CSS, which eventually helped me to land my first job out of university and it's knowledge that I still use on a daily basis.
I can't even remember my Geocities URL and I'm sure it'll be long gone by now anyway due to almost a decade of inactivity, but I guess a part of me is also a tiny bit grateful at the thought of someone at Yahoo HQ hitting the giant delete button on evidence of my cringeful teenage narcissism; gladly gone but never to be forgotten.
