“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)

Clicking through the site of Valentine Michelle Smith of West Hollywood, I was puzzled by its schizophrenic appearance.

How can it be that the same person would put a Saturn devider

over starry night background

and then, on the next page, stack teddy bears over teddy bears?

The website is not just modular as most of its contemporaries, but eclectic. The latter is unusual for amateur webdesign.

The mystery has a very simple explanation: the author is a cross-dresser.

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Village/9398/

Award buttons were a big thing in Geocities and outside. But it is difficult to find a neighborhood that was more serious about them than Pentagon. There is hardly a site without an award. For example, Military.com was generous in distinguishing soldiers of the electronic frontier with a medal.

Original URL: http://geocities.com/Pentagon/1083/

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/

086’s offer to take the graphics he made for his site menu was nice, but inappropriate. True, amateur sites of the pre-template web were build with extensive use of found graphics. But the navigation bar was the element everybody tried to keep unique: so it was a constant experiment with form and pattern of the buttons. A typical result is on the image below.

This image also provides a typical example of navigation that is made in advance. The button “Hobies” exists before anything about the Hobbies was written. 15 years later this childhood disease of webdesign is not fully conquered.

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/1098

I found a perfect illustration for my old thesis:

Free collections are the soul of vernacular web. Lots of people were building their pages with free graphics and lots of people were making collections. The many-to-many principle really worked. Making your own site and building collections was a parallel process for a lot of people.

When you click “Images” (5th button from the bottom in navigation on the left) you come to 086’s collection of images, The first link there brings us to “my own images” that are 086’s navigation elements again.

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/086/image1.html

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