The end of an internet era.
This makes me kind of sad, and extremely nostalgic. Yahoo is shutting down GeoCities. I owe my whole interest in web design to GeoCities… In 1997 (man, that feels like so long ago!) my best friend and I decided to make a website for the two of us to share. I’m not entirely sure why, I think it was mostly because it was the ‘in’ thing to do back then, and it gave us an excuse to show off pictures of our horses. We called it “Zanheather’s Barn” if I recall correctly (which was a combination of Zani (my nickname) and Heather. It was that garish default blue colour, with white text and purple links, because we only knew how to use names for colours instead of the hexidecimal codes (could you even use those back then? no idea). And of course, it was full of awful blink tags, marquee text, little animations of horses galloping across the screen, rainbow coloured horizontal lines, and really crappy midi music (we were 14 year old girls after all…). Oh, and I think eventually we managed to figure out background images and got them from random clip art sites. Then later we used the site for our imaginary stables. There used to be (and maybe still are…?) all these horse games where a bunch of people would sign up with one person who organised everything, and then you would “buy” and “sell” horses and have shows with them, and you used your website to post profiles of the horses etc. It was the original social networking on the web for horse-crazy girls!
In 1999 or so, we grew out of that phase, and our joint site disappeared, but we kept up with designing websites. We started one for the stable that we both used to ride at, and then after I changed barns I made one for that stable as well (which I’m still maintaining, 9 years later! www.colchesterstables.com). We made the switch to the paid Yahoo hosting sites after the ads on GeoCities got too annoying (and we wanted our own domain). But GeoCities will always be important in my memories at least. Heather is gone now (she passed away in 2002), but I’ll never forget sitting in front of her computer in the basement of her house, drinking slurpees, listening to Green Day’s “Brain Stew” on full blast, and arguing over whether the main page should have a midi of “Pretty Fly for a White Guy” by Offspring, or “Peaches” by the President’s of the United States of America.
