Author Archives: olia

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Cute 1.0 ⁋ by olia

+ + 2013-04-23

On Geocities everybody knows your home page was made by a cat.

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Anime as a reason for the Internet ⁋ by olia

+ + 2013-04-21

Sheldon Wai, web page maker from Hong Kong, wrote in 1997: “Anime has been one of the reasons the Internet has grown so quickly in the recent years”.

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After 10 weeks of watching the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Tumblr I totally agree. I never expected that Anime pages would pop up so frequently.

More so, observing activities of our followers, I’m ready to conclude that Anime is one the main reasons why the Internet still exists! Every new Anime related screenshot is liked, reblogged and greeted with comments.

Some recent highlights:




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Geocities Archive. Now Animated! ⁋ by olia

+ + + 2013-04-15

The page above is great, as each one at http://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com is. You are surprised and thrilled every time (72 times a day till February 2027) a new screenshot pops up. But something is missing. Screenshots are a beautiful form of illustration, but they is also limiting because
— you can’t scroll
— you can’t follow links
— you don’t see animation
Scrolling and interaction are still the future. But the animation is ready to arrive. First to THE WALL of The Photographers’ Gallery in London, UK. From the 18th of April 2013 to the 17th of June 2013 we will be streaming “animated screenshots”, namely high fidelity, pixel perfect video captures of more than 8000 Geocities home pages. The One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age video show will run for 8 weeks, will be on view 24/7, with a new shot appearing every 10 minutes.

So, if in London, you have a chance to see this and 8000 other pages in full performance:

On the 10th of May 2013 we will give a talk at the gallery. Come if you are interested in the web culture of the 90’s, digital vernacular and performative archiving.

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Geocities as Style and Marketing Gimmick @divshot ⁋ by olia

+ + 2013-04-04

2013

“A timeless Twitter Bootstrap theme built for the modern web” by web apps interface builder Divshot. 01 April 2013.
http://divshot.github.com/geo-bootstrap/

2010

Mike Lacher, The Geocities-izer, posted on tumblr 26 April 2010
http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/index.php

2004

“GeoCities 1996” by Bruce Lawson, contribution to CSS Zen Garden.
http://csszengarden.com/?cssfile=http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/zen/sample.css

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Big Day ⁋ by olia

+ 2013-03-17

felix

Yesterday Felix appeared for the first time on a Geocities screnshot

It doesn’t mean that it is the earliest appearance of that GIF on the web or Geocities web pages. It doesn’t mean that it was not present on any page in our archive before. Screenshots are too small, they only reveal the top of each page. And Felix was usually placed in the bottom of a page.

It is just that I was waiting for its appearance since weeks, and want to mark the date when it happened — March 16, 2013 (1:40 am)

To read more about Felix GIF — follow felix tag.

11.04.13: Important Update !!! :) I missed the first one. 12 February 2013 Amazing, but both are walking through clouds.

21.04.13: just detected one more, surfing through the archive.

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It is not what you think! ⁋ by olia

+ + 2013-02-28

A comment must be made about the screen shots that are on display at One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Tumblr now. At the moment, home pages from February 1997 are shown. But what one should remember when looking at the dates is that this is when they were updated for the last time. It is the date when a page was given up, not when it was made. What you see is not how the web looked in 1997, but how abandoned pages looked at that time!

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Every Missing Image Has its Own Story ⁋ by olia

+ + + 2013-02-17

If you follow One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op on tumblr, you’ve noticed many pages with broken images. You are not surprised, after all these pages are 17 years old right now. Decay fits to this age. But, important to notice, that “age” is not the only reason, or not the reason at all.

I examined the source code of pages with the broken images of the last 24 hours.


original url http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Field/2035/


original url http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/1249/

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original url http://www.geocities.com/Area51/3198/

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original url http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/3162/

In cases above the reasons for images not being displayed is that they were included from external servers. Users “hot-linked” to files and services that, very probably, seized to exist even before Geocities went down.

In the cases below, users included images stored in the directory “pictures”, right under the root directory of the main Geocities server. How the <img> tags and their alt attributes appear in the HTML files gives away that this directory was used to store Geocities logos and other standard graphics like buttons and bullets. As it seems, none of them was saved during the rescue action of Archive Team. And Yahoo shut it down, though other directories with templates and backgrounds are still available. (Read more about ancient Geocities directories still accessible today in A First Sensation and The Ghost of Geocities.)

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original url http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/7990/

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original url http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/4884/

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original url http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/5197/

Many users spread their files over several accounts, for example the creator of Tokyo/4379 had another account for storing images at Tokyo/5261. The second directory was not archived (and doesn’t appear on reocitie’s list as well).
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original url http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/4379/

Here is an interesting example of a missing image — “INTRO.GIF”, as the source code states. The image is present at the reocities copy of the page, as “intro.jpg” It would be really interesting to know more about the reocities algorithm and approach to recovering pages.
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original url http://www.geocities.com/Area51/6267/

There are many reasons for a webpage to lose its images, but in case of “Misty’s Home Page” there is no mystery. The author just linked all the images to his local hard disc. So they were never ever online! Well, to quote the webmaster: “My first attempt at having a home page […] As soon as I figure out how to do it, I will!”
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original url http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/6152/

You can read more about digital ruins in my essay Ruins and Templates of Geocities.

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Master the Web with Dancing Girl ⁋ by olia

+ + + + 2013-02-16

Just got the book Netscape Communicator, published by Academic Press in 1998. “It presents a comprehensive strategy for total mastery of the Internet and of Web content creation.” I’ve skipped many pages and rushed immediately to “Adding Animated GIFs (p.548)”. It is a short chapter of only one and a half pages actually, saying that GIFs are great and as easy to add to your document as any other graphic. You should only know that not all of them are free for “unrestricted use”, but if you want to get free ones go to yahoo.com or … http://www.cswnet.com/~ozarksof/anigif1.htm

Chuck Poynter’s collection was obviously more prominent than I assumed before, and Dancing Girl is the mascot in its header. No wonder hulagirl.gif was spreading around amateur home pages so swiftly.

Read more about null in previous posts:

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There is no Export Function ⁋ by olia

+ 2012-12-06


On the 4th of December 2012, Jason Scott, founder of Archive Team that restlessly rescues the files we uploaded all around the Internet, gave a wonderful lecture in Stuttgart. “Where are the Files?” tells the story of Jason’s personal obsession with copying and describes approachers and algorithms Archive Team uses to save the web. In some days the video version will be available at the Merz Akademie’s website.

In the end of his talk Jason confronted the audience with the three questions one should find answers to before signing up to an online service:

  1. What it can do that I can’t do myself?
  2. What are they doing with my stuff?
  3. Where is the “export” function?

The last issue is extremely interesting. Jason suggests that we shouldn’t deal with services which only offer upload options without providing reasonable ways to export your own data back to you. True! His next remark — that on the technical side implementing an “export button” is not much more work than to program an import one — also makes sense …

… but only if we assume that users want to download exactly the same what they have uploaded. That would mean if you uploaded 10 videos to youtube and then you clicked an export button and download them back to your hard disk. Or If you want just to take all your tweets, or photos, or songs back from where they were stored.

However, in my opinion, what users of Facebook, for example, would want to export is not the same as what they uploaded. They uploaded data, but want to get back the narration. To export a story is an effort on completely different scale, conceptually and programming wise.

Additionally, the story that you thought you were telling (“Timeline is your collection of the photos, stories, and experiences that tell your story“), is in fact told, designed, scripted, staged by the service. You can hit an export button till you die, it will not become yours.

So, back to the first question “What [a service] can do that I can’t do myself?”. To answer it you should probably know if you are able to narrate with your data yourself.

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Petabytes, they are like Kilobytes, just louder. @textfiles ⁋ by olia

+ 2012-10-26


Some time ago Jason Scott posted an extremely beautiful 20 sec video “My Petabyte Roommate”. How comes it has only 300 views, I don’t know. I watch it 5 times every day since three weeks and can’t stop admiring the fact that computers that store web history appear like starry backgrounds of the earliest web pages.

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