Author Archives: despens

Photos made with digital consumer cameras almost 10 years ago have a quite special quality. One can see their age, not from counting JPEG artifacts, but from the pale colors, prism effects around edges of objects, small pixel size, and most of all, the absence of people posing next to their achievements.

Photos used to exist in the context of a home page. There was not really a need to put yourself on a photo if you claimed that this was a car you renovated. It was clear, why else would you spend the server hosting space with a huge image file? Today, when photos are copied around image hosting services and almost as easily copypasted as text, you will never go down in history as the best car renovator ever if you are not present on the photo.

Original URL: http://de.geocities.com/elhondaboy/Bilder/bilder.html

“Narnies World” is one long page of hyperlinks, covering the following topics:

  • Information on the seating quality in the Okeechbobee Airport passenger lounge: “PLUSH PASSENGER LONGE…..NO LANDING FEE…..”
  • advertisement for a party DJ,
  • a list of 2009’s hurricane names,
  • political agitation on “Find Out How You Can Encourage Businesses to Stop Rewarding Illegal Aliens”,
  • a special society,
  • a list of dinig places in Okeechbobee,
  • recipes,
  • first aid tips,
  • “Games (some may be off line now and then, I have no control over their servers)”,
  • infos for Vietnam veterans,
  • Christmas pages,
  • personal web cams,
  • a list of schools, with complete addresses,
  • the advice to buy a car from Teslamotors,
  • and much, much more!

It seems to be a personal link list that has grown into a valuable resource for the inhabitants of Okeechobee, Florida. That explains why the topical mix hardly makes any sense to outsiders. Paid banners from local businesses and personal interest are blended without any indication on what is what – a true surfer’s paradise!

Oirginal URL: http://www.geocities.com/PicketFence/Garden/6268/

From the Geocities home page “LadyMouse’s Queendom” I found several banners linking to SiteFights. It is an innocent web linking project where users create home pages and include links to SiteFighters. Then surfers can vote for their favorite page. The creators of the home pages are organizing themselves in teams and try to win the most votes together, in the meantime the team captain explains HTML basics and they share tips on how to make their creations become more popular.

Apparently it was also possible to grow Christmas trees and adopt holiday dragons on one’s home page, by placing certain links back to the SiteFights server and to get different statuses, from “fighter” to “fighter/fairy” to DFairy of DRealm of the Fairies.

It is really recommended to read the rules and guidelines on the still operational site. Especially the press section is nicely designed.

SiteFights promised a comeback that apparently never happened. The “Spiritbooks” (aka Guestbooks) are full of speculations why it happened. The last real date when it was updated seems to be some time in 2005 – well, starting in 1996 that makes 9 years, not bad for a completely non-commercial, community run effort.

The most interesting part about it seems to be that many things were made manually. When a site was submitted to the competition, a “web patrol” would check if it contained the links required by the rules. They would give report if the submission was accepted “the next Monday” … after a weekend full of web surfing fun!

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Pond/6381/c-index.html (this is the Geocities page from which I reached SiteFights)

In its current state (62.59% downloaded) the Geocities Torrent already provides us with tens of thousands of historic home pages. How to find the interesting, typical or exceptional ones in such a huge amount of data?

Our private web server generates index files listing everything, but they are almost impossible to navigate. Not only do they take very long to generate on each access (this pain can be softened a bit), but also the browser rendering them can choke on 50,000+ bullet items and links.

Picking out the classic neighborhoods is a good strategy for finding a starting point and related styles and content. Many neighborhoods were also held together via web rings, however most of them are now defunct as they relied on a centralized software that went offline many years ago. The problem is that the neighborhoods only represent a small part of Geocities, the program was stopped already in 1999, when Yahoo! bought the service.

Good old websurfing still works very good. If we find a nice home page of course we follow the links placed manually by the webmasters to explore our cultural Terabyte, sometimes even coming to places outside that are still alive. It is unlikely to reach a dead end there. It still leaves the question on where to start exploring.

We decided we would get a very good sample with random homepage picking. Starting on an arbitrary location gives obscure home pages a chance to be discovered and provides a nice overview on what could be representative. – The first finding is that de.geocities.com (the German branch) contains huge numbers of link spamming sites, apparently installed shortly before the end of the service.

To facilitate random surfing, cd into the “geocities” directory of the decrunched torrent and run:

$ find . -iregex ".*geocities.*/.*/index.html?" > indexes.txt

This will take some time and save a list of all index files. You will have to re-run this command each time new data from the torrent is decrunched. Go back to the root of your web server and create this perl script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
my @indexes;
open LIST, 'geocities/indexes.txt';
while (<LIST>) {
    chomp;
    push @indexes, $_;
}
close LIST;
my $file = $indexes[int(rand($#indexes+1))];
my $URL = 'http://localhost/geocities' . substr($file,1);
print qq(Location: $URL
Status: 302 Bounce
Content-Type: text/html

Bounced to $URL
);

Access the script from your browser to be forwarded to a random Geocities site. I use this script as my browser’s start page – great fun!

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/FBI_Woman_Scully/myawa.html

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/8498/

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/2cutepups/

Recently the torrent download seems to have picked up again. So here are some hints for the other 20 users that are trying to get the full Geocities Torrent as well (all assuming you are running some sort of Unix and want to serve the Geocities copy through a web server):

Decrunching

The torrent directories UPPERCASE, LOWERCASE and NUMBERS contain huge amounts of archives. Look into these directories to find out which archives don’t have files that end in “.part” – this means they are already completely downloaded and can be decrunched. Use the following command to create a list of these archives:

$ find . -iregex ".*geocities-[a-j].*001" > list.txt

The regular expression is looking for archives from the letter a to the letter j. Then run this perl script in the same directory:

open FILE, "< list.txt";
open LOG, "> log.txt";
while (<FILE>) {
    chop; chomp;
    my $tarname = substr($_, 0, -7) . "\n";
    print `7z -y x $_`;
    print `tar -xf $tarname`;
    print `rm $tarname`;
    print LOG $_."\n";
};
close FILE;
close LOG;

Try monitoring the progress by tailing log.txt.

Serving

The torrent’s directory www.geocities.com contains a lot of file links to the YAHOOIDS directory decrunched before. Unfortunately, the file links make assumptions about where you put the torrent data in your file system. For example

1969bronco -> /geocities/YAHOOIDS/1/9/1969bronco

means that there should be a folder named “geocities” in the top hierarchy of your hard disk. LOL WUT! Relative file links would have been a better option. To fix them, first cd into www.geocities.com and save the absolute file links in a list:

$ ls -l > list.txt

Then run the following perl script:

open LIST, "< list.txt";
while (<LIST>) {
    if (~/(\S+) -> \/geocities(\S+)/) {
        print `rm -v $1`;
        print `ln -sv ..$2 $1`;
    }
}

The resulting file links look like this:

1969bronco -> ../YAHOOIDS/1/9/1969bronco

A last hint: You can speed up the loading of the www.geocities.com index in your web browser by navigating to its address on your web server, wait once for the index being created, and then saving the generated HTML as “index.html” in the www.geocities.com directory.

Browsing

Firefox is recommended to browse the contents of the Geocities Torrent, because it supports userscripts. Many URLs on Geocities pages point to absolute locations that no longer exists. The Geocities Torrent Link Fixer will change URLs in links, framesets, images and background images to point to your local copy. Inside the script, change the base URL “localhost/geocities/” according to your hosting setup.

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If you have questions please use the comments.

Original URL: http://us.geocities.com/mfctheden/

Geocities did not only hosts lots of interesting amateur images, but also amateur software. For example Pete Bone’s “Pivot”, an editor for stick figure animations. (A stick figure elephant is also included!)

This is my miserable attempt at making “Stick man” and “realistic_man” walk towards each other:

See what impressive things the author himself could do … hosted by imageshack and therefore still alive.

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/peter_bone_uk/pivot.html