Life comes at you fast. Blink and it's gone.

I didn't have a Geocities site. My first personal website (coded entirely in notepad, bitches) was hosted on my ISP's server because they gave me a whopping 2 megabytes of storage and ftp access back in 1997. Yet, when I heard Yahoo! was shutting down Geocities, I felt a surprising amount of nostalgia.

Geocities, for those unfamiliar with it, was a free web host where you could basically make a website about anything you damn well pleased with no regard for design aesthetics or proper HTML coding. It was part of the internet's early, wild-west phase. Geocities sites were often ridiculed for being ugly, never updated, and swarming with "under construction" .gif images that never really meant anything was being worked on.

It was also a precursor to the slew of "social networking" sites, blogs, etc. that everybody enjoys (or is completely sick of) today. There were other similar hosting services, but Geocities seems to have been the first one to really attract a large number of people to put up something on the internet for the world to see, resulting in a beautiful mess of blinking text, dancing hamsters, and general midi renditions of hit songs.

There were Guestbooks, which evolved into today's comment boxes. Webrings, connected sites kind of like your friend network on Facebook, only under the pretense of sharing some thematic similarity with each other. Annoying, badly placed animated images and overblown use of every possible HTML trick which became Myspace. *rimshot!*

Before the sites went under the virtual wrecking ball, a number of projects (and users) scrambled to save and archive as much as they could. Seemed an odd thing to be concerned with at first. Then it suddenly occurs to me how everything is seems to be digital now and it's easy to copy and archive, but equally easy to lose forever. Historians study letters and journal entries from normal people in different eras to understand how they lived. Since everything we do exists in the digital world, is any of what we're saying going to even going to stick around that long?

More importantly, did I just write that entire thing about geocities? Getting lost in my own head would be more fun if I didn't talk to myself so much.