RIP Geocities

The same year Braveheart was winning the Oscar for Best Picture, I was building my very first web site. While most college freshemen were going to parties and rushing fraternaties, I was caught in the World Wide Web (as it was known at the time). In my spare time, I researched what it would take make my own web site. Using Notepad to write the entire site, I hosted both pages of it from my first ever laptop. The end result was crappy--even for 1996 but it was all mine. In minutes, photos could be posted, manifestos could be written, and blinking under construction animations could be turned on.

Version 1.0 was basically a full screen black and white photo of my friend Nate's head as a background with text overlaid on top. I'm a little fuzzy on the exact point or even what I put on there but I was drunk with power. It did not take me long to realize It needed a new home. After all, it only worked if my laptop was in my dorm room and connected to the Internet and you knew the IP address. The summer after freshman year of college, I set out to rebuild the site from the ground up (yes both pages). With my newly gleemed knowledge of HTML tables, I made a sort of a template and started posting scanned photos. To avoid the unplugged laptop problem I found a free host-- Geocities.com. Yahoo had recently bought them out so I already had an
account.

And geocities.com/olsenis was born. Everything was great until I filled up my 15MB of free space. That's right "megabytes" or roughly 5 MP3s worth of space. For years, Geocities got my hard earned cash to serve up cheesy college photos but in 2007 greener pastures becconed in the shape of Blogger (aka blogspot.com). Recently purchased by Google, it promised to eliminate the need to write HTML and gave away 150MB of photo space for free. More features, space, and unlimited bandwidth all for free! I spent $30, grabbed the domain theslowlane.net and never looked back.

Well, never looked back until this week when an email informed me that Geocities was closing its doors and I needed to get my stuff out. The only thing left is the Brian" name tag that links to theslowlane.net. Just seeing the name tag brings back memories of late nights messing with code and moving things around to not go over the 15MB limit. The expensive hosting service won't be missed but the excitement of paving a new path on The Information Super Highway will always be remembered fondly.