Geocities Research Institute

> “Make your own home page” is an old appeal. It is older than the mid 90’s. Not even 1994, but 1992. On the internet, one year is equal to ten astronomical years, there is a century between 1992 and 1994.

> So in 1992, the home page was a document that you saw when you opened your browser – which at that time was WWW on the NEXT computer.

> As the author of “The Whole Internet” noticed in 1992: “The home page provided by CERN is a good entry point into the web; it points you to a lot of resources fairly quickly. However, there are lots of reasons to want your own home page.”

> He meant that maybe the links provided by CERN are far from your interests and you’d prefer, for example, links to medicine rather than physics resources when you open your browser. So you could edit the CERN page, filling it with your links and notes and it would be your home page.

> So 50 years later :), in 1993, with the arrival of the Mosaic browser, the web left academia. Web users got ideas and tools to extend home pages, and turn them into websites. The term “home page” started to change its meaning. It became the first page of a website. Then as a sort of metonymy, it started to mean personal web pages. Making a home page soon meant not making the first document of your website, but making your personal website, your home page, YOUR HOME ON THE WEB.

Olia Lialina, net artist who does a lot of internet history stuff: https://blog.geocities.institute/archives/5118

Wrote about homepages…

The Cutting Room Floor - Research on unused and cut video game content. Definitely one of my all time favorite sites to spend spare time on.
https://tcrf.net

Ken Fern's Plant databases
https://theferns.info/

U2-3 - The Famous 1000 copies of U2's first ever release
https://www.u2-3.com/

Dana Countryman's Virtual Museum of Unusual LP Cover Art (may contain some albeit low quality NSFW artwork)
http://www.danacountryman.com/danacovers/danacovers.html

One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age - Digging through the Geocities Torrent
https://blog.geocities.institute/

and finally, The End Of The Internet
https://hmpg.net/

I've kept a bit of a running list on my site here:
https://jason.nabein.me/#links

Setting aside the slowness, tho I am not a designer, these all strike me as just visual noise. I think animated borders, animated shiny text, animated meteor backgrounds today are no better than an early 2000s page with animated elements. It doesn't help communicate, it just attracts the eye until one learns to tune it out. And it kinda tells me that we're not really learning to build better stuff over the decades.

What is the difference between the animated Border Beam in this library and the animated hr in the vintage example of an archived geocities page?

https://magicui.design/docs/components/border-beam

https://blog.geocities.institute/archives/3879

Check out Digital Folklore[1] if you're into this aesthetic, it's a good collection of essays on Geocities, the early web, and related topics. One of the authors' web site[2] is also worth a look (warning: there's sound :) ). She also runs a Tumblr blog[3] that posts screenshots of real Geocities sites.

[1]: http://digitalfolklore.org/

[2]: http://art.teleportacia.org/olia.html

[3]: http://blog.geocities.institute/

This whole "Geocities museum" site is a gem. Thanks for sharing it.

Main page: http://blog.geocities.institute/

Early Chinese online poetry: http://blog.geocities.institute/archives/5466

Big nostalgia kick from seeing webrings, blingee, clipart homepages mentioned and analysed.