Geocities/Neocities Finds

Started by grungor, Jun 27, 2024, 02:37 AM

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grungor

Jun 27, 2024, 02:37 AM


A love letter to 90s personal web!
Post cool finds from geocities archives or cool neocities pages. I just wanted to create a thread of interesting personal websites that either be cool to use as inspiration for anyone looking to make their own personal website, or just cool websites to marvel at!



Information:
What is GeoCities?

Quote from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCitiesGeoCities, later Yahoo! GeoCities, was a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free and to browse user-created websites by their theme or interest, active from 1994 to 2009. GeoCities was started in November 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and was named Beverly Hills Internet briefly before being renamed GeoCities. On January 28, 1999, it was acquired by Yahoo!, at which time it was reportedly the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web.

In its original form, site users selected a "city" in which to list the hyperlinks to their Web pages. The "cities" were named after real cities or regions according to their content: For example, computer-related sites were placed in "SiliconValley" and those dealing with entertainment were assigned to "Hollywood", hence the name of the site. Soon after its acquisition by Yahoo!, this practice was abandoned in favor of using the Yahoo! member names in the URLs.

What is Neocities?
Quote from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeocitiesNeocities is a commercial web hosting service for static pages. It offers 1 GB of storage space for free sites and no server-side scripting for both paid and free subscriptions. The service's expressed goal is to "revive the support of free web hosting of the now-defunct GeoCities". Neocities was launched in 2013 by Kyle Drake. As of April 2024, it hosted more than 765,600 sites.



Resources:
There are a lot of online resources available to help you find these websites, so here are a few that yield interesting results:

  • https://geocities.restorativland.org/ This is a really really helpful archive because it very easily organizes all the websites they have. It even gives a thumbnail of what is on the front page of the website, so you don't have to click on the link only to find that it isn't interesting. Overall, I would suggest using this to find geocities archives the most, due to how easy it is to find cool stuff!

  • https://www.oocities.org I haven't personally used this archive before, but it was suggested to me and it has some interesting data related to geocities that some may find intriguing. This isn't as easy to navigate as restorativland, and there are no thumbnails, so you never really know what you are going to before you click on it. It is kinda fun to navigate though, because it feels like searching that eventually pays off when you see a really cool website!

  • https://web.archive.org/web/19960901000000*/http://www.geocities.com/ The last resource to finding archived geocities pages that I will recommend is the Internet Archive itself! While definitely the hardest to search through out of all of these, it can be the most fun depending on how you look at it. Searching this way is more true to the original experience because you are viewing it as it was during each time a page was archived, as opposed to the previous two websites, where you only see the website from a single point in time. It is also very fun to just go clicking on every link you see to find some really cool webrings and communities!

  • https://neocities.org/browse For finding neocities pages that are still up today, all you need to do is use the browse page of neocities! There are tags at the bottom that you can use to filter and you even get thumbnails of the websites' homepages. These can be interesting to look at because they tend to be modern takes on the aesthetics of 90s personal websites. I have seen quite a bit of extremely impressive websites through neocities, and quite a bit of the userbase has... much better design sensibilities than people in the 90s, to say the least.


Finds:
Here are some cool sites that I have found over time:



Anyways, I've spent too much time talking. Go find some epic sites, yo!

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    .·:*¨༺ peace, love, and grungor  ༻¨*:·.

    grungor

    #1
    Jun 27, 2024, 01:23 PM
    Here's a cool site with a bunch of cool info and resources related to RPGs! It has quite a cool catalog of JRPGs for the PSX, as well as images and music from some cool RPGs! It also has cat pics!!!

    https://geocities.restorativland.org/TimesSquare/3899/
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      grungor

      #2
      Jun 27, 2024, 01:41 PM
      A really interesting looking website with a cool story. Not a ton to this, although that may just be due to the archive not maintaining all of the links. I looked at the Internet Archive version and it seems like there was flash on the website, but Ruffle, the flash archive that Internet Archive uses, seems to be blocking whatever was there.

      https://geocities.restorativland.org/TimesSquare/6313/
      https://web.archive.org/web/20010516212002/http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/6313/
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        snaiil

        #3
        Jun 27, 2024, 02:28 PM Last Edit: Jun 27, 2024, 02:44 PM by snaiil
        Though not technically a geo/neocities site I found this by scavenging restorativland and opening swaths of links. This is some pre-2000s shit. Never again will we see nerds so mercilessly proud over petty feats of indignation.
        https://www.actsofgord.com/index.php

        Some guy's Depeche Mode themed personal webpage. Includes some weird art, a Depeche Mode gallery, and a brilliant description of himself.
        https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/Aurora/1530

        On restorativ all but the last link is dead, but they are recoverable on the Wayback machine by copying the address and scraping out the URL (as they naturally appear in a popup window first). Somebody's personal webpage that has that Western anime aesthetic in full, and other outdated internet trappings that are endearing.
        https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/Aurora/4240/ (first found it at this link)
        https://web.archive.org/web/20070810135004/http://www.sentimental-reaction.com/ (wayback machine)

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          snaiil

          #4
          Jun 27, 2024, 03:37 PM Last Edit: Jun 28, 2024, 03:21 PM by snaiil
          https://geocities.restorativland.org/TimesSquare/5433/
          Most of the page is some real geek shit (very cool Warhammer image gallery), but first of all, if you click the sole link you get to listen to a nice midi rendition of what I think is the USSR song Катюша/Katyusha; for some reason every link on that page proceeds to download the midi file instead of playing it  (:()
          https://geocities.restorativland.org/TimesSquare/3413/
          Jackpot, the error message on "Our boys" isn't real; sadly, Wayback machine doesn't seem to have caught what madness was going on here, or I'm not clever enough to have figured out what's going on with this site

          https://geocities.restorativland.org/SiliconValley/8569 (warning: flashing colors)
          https://geocities.restorativland.org/CapeCanaveral/7899/
          https://geocities.restorativland.org/SiliconValley/9448/
          https://geocities.restorativland.org/MotorCity/1377/ (like the vampire page, also has the altars of madness texture)
          https://geocities.restorativland.org/Paris/2091/

          https://geocities.restorativland.org/Tokyo/9110/, has non-functional features that are functional at the still active https://www.studioshinnyo.com/, such as image galleries

          I have been looking at sites all day from mania but there is too much crazy shit to see, somebody else has got to dig some up
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