In September, when I wrote about Geocities closing down, I should have guessed there would be someone out there with the aptitude and inclination to preserve all that content – and it turns out there were quite a lot of people. Idly Googling myself* over Christmas, I stumbled upon reocities.com.
Reocities is the result of some last minute, very hard work by a coder in the Netherlands, ‘J‘, who was suddenly inspired to download and save as much of Geocities as possible. He’s managed to store over 2 million accounts, including the venerable Plush But Itchy Land of Cheesecake and Suchlike.
J’s diary, The Making of ReoCities, tells you exactly how he did it. He had so little time to capture all the files that the diary reminds you of a thriller – you’d just need to swap MB/s for mph and pretend that Yahoo! was about to detonate a bomb rather than turn off some servers, and it could be a ropey episode of 24.
By the morning of the big switch-off, you can see that J is thinking along the same lines: “08:15 AM. Mod_rewrite reminds me of a chainsaw. It’s extremely powerful stuff but if you’re not careful you’re going to get hurt, badly.”
I’m not sure I can go along with J’s emotional argument that Yahoo!’s closure of Geocities is akin to the Taliban’s destruction of ancient religious artefacts, but I do think he’s done a great thing.
And he’s not the only one. Another site which mirrors Plush But Itchy is the frame-free geocities.ws. They’ve stored sites by name rather than using the original Neighbourhoods structure. So if you’re looking for your own site but can’t remember the address, try searching there. Perhaps sensibly, given the legal ambiguity of hosting other people’s content, geocities.ws have opted to make their site anonymous.
The smartest-looking Geocities backup site I’ve seen so far is geociti.es, built by The Archive Team (slogan: “We are going to rescue your shit”). They’ve written a history of Geocities and are looking for people to help with Geocities ‘heritage’ projects.
Bizarrely, as a result of these and other efforts, there are now more opportunities than ever before to visit the Land of Cheesecake and suchlike.
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