October 26, 2009 signifies the official closing of Geocities. All sites will be gone. In the past few months several online places have tried hard to gather and preserve sites that have been abandoned by their site owners or whether the site has been moved elsewhere, but retain great information. Whether by documenting the general information of the site, screencapping, or hosting the entire site, obviously this was an important project to tackle since the site dates back to 1994.
Some of the places online that have worked hard to try to document as many sites are:
FanHistory – Fanhistory.com:Geocities preservation project
ArchiveTeam – Geocities Project
Internet Archive – Saving a Historical Record of GeoCities
Of course I believe there are other projects out there, but as for significant contributions, these sites have done their best to reach out to the community as a lot of webmasters today may have used GeoCities as some point in time. A lot of people might laugh, but even though there was a lot of bad design, there were some pretty nifty websites out there that were tastefully and simply created, but also provided great information. Things that became of great interest were fan sites, and some of todays bloggers that have moved onto self-hosting. Geocities was undoubtedly a great stepping block.
So, I guess, this is my own personal eulogy. Your thoughts about GeoCities final rest?
I still knew people who used geocities until a few weeks ago.
It was an awesome site and will be missed.
Yes, my first webpage was there. I have known a lot of people who were on GeoCities… a lot of them I still visit even when they moved to self-hosting and other places.