The Manic Mechanic

It's a sad day in the world wide web today. No, really, it is. Today marks the final moments for GeoCities, the ground-breaking free web hosting service that so many (including myself) made use of in the early days of the int@rweb. Yahoo bought up GeoCities during the dotcom boom for a couple billion dollars. Once the third-highest trafficked site on the web, it's since dropped down somewhere around 192. Yahoo has decided that the once proud service is no longer worth the time and effort and is to pull the plug sometime today. Site owners were sent emails warning of the impending closure. After today, the site goes dark permanently.

This does not surprise me at all, yet I still feel sad. I actually had a couple sites I put together starting back in late '95. I knew quite a few people who had site on the service as well, some of whom I discovered through the early concept of webrings, which GeoCities pioneered. I dabbled in HTML and Java for the first time on the site, eventually incorporating an on-page webcam that was the source of countless hours of, well, fun. Around the turn of the century (I still love using that term) I mostly let my pages stagnate, in fact, the bio pages listed my age as 36 (that's over 11 years difference now). A few weeks ago, after getting a "final notice" of the termination of service, I went in, did a wget of all pages and files, then deleted all content, sparing my personal pages their ignominious demise via corporate decision.

Yahoo did not offer much in the way of help as far as relocating content to another service. If you paid for the GeoCities Pro service, there was an option to move all content to Yahoo Web Hosting. To the countless free users, it's all up to you. The site will be decommissioned, with all data irretrievably lost, forever. Personal pages of all kinds will be gone. There are people who have died who's pages were a constant memorial to their owners. There were lots of simple pages made as little outposts for people to have a "presence" on the web. Tons of hobbyist sites, photo pages, band sites, you name it. All will be gone with a flip of a switch, basically. Some efforts were being made to try and capture as many pages and sites from the servers before it all goes dark, with dubious success. All told, there was about 10 terabytes of data comprising the whole of GeoCities. Hell, I actually have a little more than that available on one server in the basement now. How the world has changed. And not really for the better.

Take a moment to remember those early days of the 'net, if you were like me and part of it. It was a lot of fun, but a lot of work too. Nowadays, it seems too easy, with an app for this or that, Facebook, Twitter, blogging, etc. Back then, though, all those garish sites took a lot of work. But it was so worth it. I'll miss it. Especially after seeing what I had abandoned all those years ago.

So, Comcast has done a Comcastic thing and increased my webspace from a measly 25MB to a whopping 1GB for each account I have. They also did a craptastic thing during the upgrade process that requires cookies to be placed on those PCs that retrieve data from those servers, even during remote loading. In other words, since I use that server space to host files that I use as part of my journal entries, if those reading my LJ have configured their PCs to reject 'third party' cookies, they cannot retrieve the files. This tossed a monkey wrench into my posting methods. Some have complained about my 'photo posts' being devoid of pictures. So, I am left with a dilemma as to how to go about finding reliable server space. My first choice of using my own domain is unworkable till I set up hosting. Using my home server is a possibility, but it's rickety, old and I did not want it to be subjected to constant spidering by web robots and search engines. LJ has space available, but it's soley for pictures, and the auto thumbnailing wrecks attempts at page layout. So, I dusted off my old Flickr account in the meantime and will give that a try.

To that end, here is a test. Same picture, different hosting. First is off of Flickr, the second from Comcrap. This is to check if the Comcast Cookie Conundrum is still in effect. Also, since some workplaces restrict site such as Flickr, there is a chance that hosting will be thwarted too. If I may impose a bit on my readership, can those who have gotten this far into my post tell me if they can see both photos?

One:

Flickr

Two:

Comcast

I have a big bunch of photos to include in upcoming posts, and I dont want it to be an exercise in frustration. The latter has been one of the big reasons for my apathy in posting.

Thanks in advance!