As mentioned in Happy 2009!, because of an error during archiving, around 50,000 pages lost their real “last updated” information and were marked with the date of their archival. So we decided to change their status from “last modified” to “archived on”.
before:
after:
If you’ve been following One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op for some time — or maybe even already for more than 12 years! — you may notice that this is actually the least important change. The content and flow have changed dramatically. It is no longer chronological. A page that is clearly from 1996 can appear after one from 2000, followed by a genuine April 2009 site, and then something from 2005… Sometimes you can tell it from the content or style, or simply because the webmaster put the last updated date on the page.
It’s quite a roller coaster: Backstreet Boys fandom (2001) next to Frames No Frames (1997) next to Goodbye GeoCities! (2009).
And it’s not only about chronology. The stream has become somewhat curated. You can see how someone (or something) is moving through a particular neighborhood, following links, or grabbing pages from a specific web ring. Before, it never happened that several pages about dogs, cats, Star Wars, or dollz would appear in a row. Now it’s quite common. There can be multiple Titanic pages in a row, or a series of car-related sites. Right now, there are many screenshots about golf, all from the Augusta neighborhood. I think this gives a one-sided, unrealistic picture of GeoCities. But maybe I’m just used to a different dynamic: completely unrelated pages appearing one after another, the only thing they had in common being the time they were last modified. Before the error, topics would sometimes reappear for days or weeks too, but it was usually because something significant was happening in the world: the death of Princess Diana, Yahoo! introducing new TOS, September 11, a new X-Files season, Christmas, Yahoo! announcing the closure…
On the bright side, it’s a real pleasure to see so many older pages again!
Another new issue is the flood of screenshots of pages that don’t have an index.html, so we only see the file names in the directory. It can be interesting and even educational at times, but I’m afraid this is not what our followers would want to see for too long. We’re considering removing those pages from the timeline.