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The Dancing Girl GIF edited for Thongchai “Bird” McIntyre ⁋ by olia

+ 2014-03-05

null As you may remember one of the most exciting facts about the dancing girl GIF is that there is a blinking pixel next to her left leg. It was forgotten there by it’s author Chuck Pointer. If you can’t see it on the original, look at the contemporary reenactment

Nobody ever cared or dared to remove this dot. At least this is what I thought until the Geocities Archive image search started to deliver the first results some days ago. We only have 33% of all images indexed right now, so these are not the final results, but as for now there are 130 girls dancing through the geocities ruins.
Closer look detected that two of them are LACKING THE PIXEL.

They come from the Thongchai “Bird” McIntyre fan site. Bird is number one popstar in Thailand, if to believe the Wikipedia article. This article btw is nothing compared to information and visuals one can get on him from his fans’ pages on the Geocities. Discography, news, Bird’s appearances in films and TV shows are properly documented.
In the beginning “Bird Thongchai McIntyre Thai Top Superstar of all time” web site was in the Hollywood neighborhood http://www.geocities.com/bbee_bird/, then it moved to the vanity profile http://www.geocities.com/bbee_bird. In 1999 the pages migrated to its own domain http://www.bbbird.com/, only the homepage is there now, the rest is in the Internet Archive.

The dancing girl appears on two jukebox pages


http://www.geocities.com/bbee_bird/birdjukebox.html

and

http://www.geocities.com/bbee_bird/birdsjukebox.html

It would be great to know if it was the webmaster of bbee_bird (or may be even Bird himself?!) who removed the pixel, or did she or he found it like this, with the pixel removed, in one of the collections not known to me. I wrote to all the email addresses associated with this website, but didn’t get any answer yet.

Anyway, please welcome: The Dancing Girl without the Pixel, dancew.gif

Read more about the dancing girl in previous posts:

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Coping with the Overwhelming ⁋ by despens

+ 2014-02-23

For a cultural researcher, the amount of material contained in the ArchiveTeam’s Geocities copy is simply overwhelming. The tumblr blog One Terabyte Of Kilobyte Age Photo Op presents one way to make it all accessible, by transforming it into an exciting soap opera of screen shots.

With the Geocities Research Institute’s latest effort, categorizing the home pages can go as easily as checking tumblr: When accessed through the Geocities proxy server, each post is connected with the local database, widgets to view and modify the displayed home page’s metadata are inserted into tumblr.

Tagging is a good way to work with experimental or explorational ontologies, since a hierarchy can be built ad-hoc. Different views on the same material can exist at the same time — a prerequisite for giving meaning to a collection as large as Geocities. Tags are useful before a complete collection of items is fully known and can be created independently by different researchers, without too much prior agreement on a vocabulary.

In conclusion, each new opportunity and context to enter meta information has the potential to be valuable. Meta information does not have to be definite or objective to help structuring items, as long as the system applying it performs reasonably fast and allows quick combinations.

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Geocities Archive image search first results ⁋ by olia

2014-02-14

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Geocities Top 3 Tumblr Users’ Choice ⁋ by olia

+ + 2014-02-07

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One year ago, on the 7th of February 2013, the first Geocities screenshot appeared on One Terabyte of the Kilobyte Age Photo Op. Since then a new one was coming every 20 minutes (apart from several glitches that led to some hours of silence).25 666 pages were posted till this moment. And we still have material for 13 more years. There are many things we learned about Geocities and the Vernacular Web in general from observing our own Tumblr: we found examples for our statements and theories about the early web and had to face some facts that we were not aware of before.

And we got almost 9000 followers. Which doesn’t bring us to any Tumblr top list, but we are very happy about this number. Because these are 9000 people voluntarily receiving a snap of the web history 3 times an hour. They like and reblog, they give us feed back and spread the word. Seeing what pages are getting popular and what are ignored helps us to understand what web users of today find exciting about the web of yesterday. It is too early to make statements about it after one year, but the time is right to celebrate our followers’ activity during the first year.

To do so we put together Top Three of the most popular Geocities Screenshots, by manually tracking the activity of tumblr users on the blog. Now we invite you to visit the mirrors of the three restored home pages.

To restore your beloved pages, Dragan dug deeper into our own archive’s subfolders, went to archive.org, reocities.com, examined parts of Geocities still accessible online. Read more about it in Dragan’s elaborate post The Anniversary Restoration.

See the pages in your own browser, surf (external links will be mostly broken), read the guest books!

#3 I HAVE A WEBSITE

Published on JANUARY 4, 2014 (11:20 AM) got 6630 NOTES so far.

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Hi, I’m Bobby from London, England. You might wonder why an Englishman is having a web site in this geocities neighborhood. Well, I’ve had my holiday in the Philippines …

tumblr: http://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/post/72192098002/
original: http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/3269/
restored: http://geocities.contemporary-home-computing.org/www.geocities.com/Tokyo/3269/

#2 Cute Boy Site

Published on AUGUST 3, 2013 (2:20 PM) got 9157 NOTES so far.

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Who do you wanna see as the Cute Boy of the month, March?? Click here to vote!

tumblr: http://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/post/57241197370/original-url
original: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/1048/
restored: http://geocities.contemporary-home-computing.org/www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/1048/

#1 Divirced Dads Page

Published on APRIL 28, 2013 (2:20 AM) got 10412 NOTES so far.

This page is to support all of you divorced fathers that have encountered grave injustice in the Family Law issues due to the blindness of the Canadian Justice System. It is my life long goal to show the Government law makers of Canada, that it is time to change the law.

tumblr: http://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/post/49048451978/
original: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/7172/
restored: http://geocities.contemporary-home-computing.org/www.geocities.com/Paris/7172/

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The Anniversary Restoration ⁋ by despens

+ + + 2014-02-07

To celebrate one year of our Geocities screenshot tumblr One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op I restored the top 3 reblogged and liked home pages posted there, as tracked by Olia.

The access has been optimized for contemporary browsers and high interactivity. On the Authenticity/Access chart, this restoration is placed in between “screenshots” and “HTTP mirror access, contemporary, browser AddOn”: The pixels generated by contemporary browsers are not be the same as the ones rendered by a 1997/98 browser, the URLs are not the original ones; however, the interactivity comes close to the original, the graphics look fine enough and are animated. As a bonus, a first time in website restoration, the embedded MIDI files have been transformed into audio recordings using timidity and a Soundblaster AWE32 instrument set.1

#3 I have a website

All material except the counter image was present in the ArchiveTeam’s Geocities torrent distribution. The missing image icq.JPG probably never was uploaded by the user, it is not present on any public Geocities mirror.

The counter image was lifted from the Wayback Machine. The original URL http://www.geocities.com/cgi-bin/counter was probably working with browser referrer information to assign the counter to a certain web page.2 The Internet Archive’s web crawler saved the counter showing 0000 over a few years. We will not be able to reconstruct the number of visitors to the page, but at least we can imagine how it looked.

The MIDI file embedded in the page, a version of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”, is heavily damaged and produces strange noises when played back via timidity. I haven’t verified how it would be interpreted on a legacy system, but since the MIDI file specification is not met in this file it will for sure not reproduce a perfect version of the song. (The file is damaged or not present in all public mirrors of Geocities.)

#2 Cute Boy Site

This simple home page posed no further problems, “As Long As You Love Me” by the Backstreet boys was conserved in a perfect MIDI version. The missing image devlayy.jpg never left the author’s hard disk, it is referenced outside of the homepage’s root directory in a folder called Annies GirlClub.

#1 Divorced Dads Page

From Divorced Dads, the ArchiveTeam’s copy only contains the main page. I took some missing pages and from reocities. The downside of reocities is that there is no Last-Modified header delivered from the server, the upside is that the original HTML is less modified than on the wayback machine.3 Thankfully the wayback machine delivers original Last-Modified dates in extra HTTP headers, so I was able to transfer this metadata to the reocities copies.4

The banner on the bottom was replaced with a generic banner ad from this particular banner exchange service from 2003, as found on the wayback machine.

The top of the page features a Java applet called “GeoGuide” that is referenced on many Geocities home pages. Unfortunately, Java applets have posed issues for webcrawler-based archiving, since they are opaque blobs of code that might load further resources, for example images or object code libraries. Most crawlers wouldn’t even download the applet files because of the low likeliness that they would work later. There is no public mirror of Geocities available that contains this applet, and until now no screenshot or other form of documentation of GeoGuide was found.

The counter used to be delivered from a personalized URL, http://www.geocities.com/cgi-bin/counter/jacquestheman, the first time it was checked on the wayback machine in 2003 was already producing a “file not found”. Since Geocities moved their user tracking to a separate server visit.geocities.com, I decided to look there and indeed found four zeroes printed in a nice font, still alive. This might be the counter the page’s author customized for himself, or it might not be.

All sub pages use a non-standard font called “Paramount” <FONT FACE="Paramount">. A metadata tag <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Mozilla/4.01 [en] (Win95; I) [Netscape]"> hints towards Windows 95 being the platform the pages were created on, but there is no information available about what this font might be: There are some freeware fonts with that name, but no font of such a name was ever included in for example the “Microsoft Plus” packs for Windows that gave users extra features and fonts; Microsoft Office never shipped with a Paramount as well. Since the choice of font would be too arbitrary and the likeliness of page visitors having exactly this font installed in 1997/98 to actually see it is very low, I decided to leave the browser’s default font in place.

Enjoy!

  1. If the restorations are accessed via a legacy system, audio authenticity suffers because the original MIDI files have been replaced with OGG and MP3 recordings. [↩]
  2. Upon loading images, browsers send a Referer header to the server that contains the URL of the web page the image is embedded in. Like this, servers can return different images for the same URL. [↩]
  3. Reocities just inserts a Javascript banner after the opening body tag and seems to have done a simple search/replace on geocities.com to reocities.com. [↩]
  4. The headers encountered during crawl time are reproduced by The Internet Archive as starting with X-Archive-Orig-, for example X-Archive-Orig-Last-Modified: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 01:00:05 GMT [↩]
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Corporate News ⁋ by olia

+ + 2014-02-04

Meanwhile, the Geocities Research Institute got its own ex-libris. The stamp was designed by the inimitable Manuel Bürger, designer of the Digital Folklore Reader, Transmediale festival, Shake Your Tree label and other great books, records and events.

The stamp features the names of GRI founders and surfing (!) Felix, the cat that was there even before LOL cats.

Thank you, Manuel!

Geocities Research Institute Exlibris designed by Manuel Buerger

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Pages in Memory of Princess Diana ⁋ by olia

+ 2013-12-23

Its Christmas 2013 IRL, but 31st of August 1998 in Geocities time — the 1st anniversary of Diana’s death. On this occasion I collected ten tribute pages to the Princess of Wales, created and last updated from the 1st of September 1997 till “today”.

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the 31st of August 1998
original URL: http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/Strasse/1564/


the 30th of August 1998
original URL: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Boulevard/6060/


the 24th of June 1998
original URL: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/3304/


the 16th of April 1998
original URL: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Acres/4446/


the 7th of January 1998
original URL: http://www.geocities.com/Augusta/2826/


the 3rd of November 1997
original URL: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7034/


the 13th October 1997
original URL: http://www.geocities.com/RodeoDrive/7161/


the 19th of September
original URL: http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Shores/9966/

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the 2nd of September 1997
original URL: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Boulevard/3339/

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the 1st of September 1997
original URL: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/6069/

August 31, 2021: added 5 more pages last updated in between 1999 and 2007

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“last updated” micro dynamics ⁋ by olia

+ + + 2013-12-18

On the 26th of August 1998 one Geocities home page was “last updated” every 25 minutes.
On the 26th of August 1997 — every 45 minutes.
On the 26 of August 1996 — every 8 hours.

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Awesome and AutoAwesome ⁋ by olia

+ + 2013-12-11

I visit Blingee.com a lot these days, because I miss the wildness of Hyves and because there so many new GIFs around made with a new Google tool — AutoAwesome — that automatically adds a snow fall effect to photos that it recognizes as winter landscapes; or a twinkle effect if lights are detected. Autoawesome GIFs are monumental and elegant. They are like a proper reincarnation of snow Java applets, and this time it is real magic because it always works and because it doesn’t even take one click to make them.

But I don’t really think about the applets. Every autoawesome GIF that comes across my way makes me type the B word in the location bar to check what are users up to on Blingee. How is it snowing and twinkling there? Well, it is different: pictures are much smaller, the amount of effects applied is much bigger.

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see the gallery

Apart from Christmas motives, Blingee users are as always busy with the usual emo and girly stuff. In recent days, a big thing were tributes to Paul Walker and Nelson Mandela.


see more at the gallery


see more at the gallery

P.I.P tribute graphics are a vivid part of Blingee culture, which is usually ridiculed outside of the community. See for example the tumblr blog Blingees in Memoriam that collects the most naive examples.  Though I don’t know what would make any of the GIFs featured there more ridiculous than “like” orgies on Facebook R.I.P. posts and communities.

*

On Blingee you can see the elements (“stamps”) used in each picture and trace their origins, which is a unique feature that deserves a proper research. So I looked at the “source code” of Mandela and Walker GIFs. There are usually around 8 stamps involved in the animation, i found examples with 20 ones, theoretically more are possible.

For example this image was made using 7 stamps uploaded to the system by 6 different users.


Stamps are not only chosen from the library. They are scaled, rotated, moved around … Blingee users are facing a hell of work every day.

How will mourning pics be made autoawesomely? I expect two solutions:

  1. If the face of a dead person is detected, appropriate stamps (R.I.P, crucifix, black frame) are applied.
  2. If a coffin, a tomb stone or people dressed in black are detected, the “raindrops on window” effect is added to the picture.

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My Nightmare ⁋ by olia

+ + + 2013-12-09

There is a bunch of Geocities websites that were last updated in the second half of 1998. It is very likely that they were created the same day they were abandoned. The websites are empty, look very similar, appear one after another on the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Tumblr, don’t evoke any memories … a real nightmare.

Apart from the rulers, a missing Java applet, Tesla coils and a dripping faucet …

… they all contain a link to a page on Intel.com that does not exist anymore. The paths to  elements used in the java applet’s parameters lead to the source on archive.org:

Most images are broken, but the context is clear now: in 1998 Intel was trying out a web page builder, or a Web Page Wizard.

There’s nothing to download to start using the Intel.com Web Page Wizard, so get started now, and create a your own home on the Web!

The Intel.com Web Page Wizard was last updated in 1999, the year Geocities was already bought by Yahoo!, which introduced its own builder; the year time of page wizards was over outside of free hosting services anyway.

Sadly, Intel’s effort is not contained in the Geocities torrent, so there are no HTML files, no read_me. But there are also good news: the images of intel/wizard/images/ are still online, so one can still hotlink to them :)

http://p1.geo.sp2.yahoo.com/images/members/intel/wizard/images/dark_top.gif
http://p1.geo.sp2.yahoo.com/images/members/intel/wizard/images/dark_rule.gif
http://p1.geo.sp2.yahoo.com/images/members/intel/wizard/images/dark_bottom.gif
http://p1.geo.sp2.yahoo.com//images/members/intel/wizard/animation/drip.gif

The bars and the faucet leaking Pentium Juice made quite a career online, not as part of the template, but on their own. They appear in free collections. They appear on pages outside of geocities.

On angelfire:
http://www.angelfire.com/on2/CRYSTAL/
http://www.angelfire.com/al/alaaa/

On tripod
http://zombieshellonearth.tripod.com/
http://def777.tripod.com/index2.htm
http://mojazz.tripod.com/

Outside of free hosting services:
http://www.ten-k.com/ (an exceptional example: the layout is as it was designed by the Wizard and the applet still works)
http://www.electricleather.com/
http://skdeitch.com

The Skdeitch site is an interesting example: the only animated appearance of the Tesla coils until now. (Though, every time I see them, I’m surprised that they were not originally animated. Btw, another lame thing: all 4 gifs have an opaque black background. If the background would be transparent, I’m sure we would know them from more pages.)

Other unique animations on this site suggest that Seth K. Deitch is the author of the animated versions.

Intel’s “Nightmare” is interesting on at least two layers:

  1. as a clear source of four graphics that made their way into free collections
  2. as a template of the pre-template era. More of a sample page than a template, scaffold code that users had to edit.

And it is scary as death.


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