Wednesday, June 18, 2008

My Geocities Page: An 'Ancient' Internet Artifact that I Dug Up on Google Today

It's kind of funny that I ended up, "working for the Internet" as I said, buzzed during a Sunday happy hour last week. So, I don't work for for THE Internet, yet an Internet company, an ecommerce company to be exact. (But it was funnier the way I said it when I was tipsy....)

In 1995, my friend Jenn G. and I started a column, which I came up with the name for, in our high school newspaper: Nothing But Net. We both fell in love with this novel idea of interconnected computers and reviewed websites each week. I am in the process of moving so I do not have those papers with me-- but I should see if any of those sites are still around!
The Internet was still pretty new to the common household user, but Jenn and I were hip and with it. So hip and with it that we made the front page of the Sunday Pocono Record story about young people and the Internet. They interviewed us about the 'net, computers, and whatnot. We were famous for a Sunday and everyone at school was talking to us and everyone at school wanted us to help show them how to use it and how to create email addresses. Jenn was amazed at Yahoo and the directory they were building. I can't take credit- she built a Geocities site before me- but once I got off to Wilkes, I started my own site.
Anyway, back to high school. Jenn even knew was SPAM was back then and was quoted in the Pocono Record talking about it, which is hysterical-- she put her email address on something and got "spammed." She ventured into computer science and while we fell out of touch, I know she worked for some big time companies in the Internet industry and am sure she still does. She got more into the technical stuff that I am not smart enough for. I've dabbled it in as a hobby. She is a whiz.

Now that I work "for the Internet," I am up with the latest trends, at least within ecommerce and also all the Web 2.0 stuff- or at least I try to be. So, when I see someone who has a really old school site, I chuckle and think of my first website- a Yahoo Geocities website. No business's site should look like that! Haha. I am not a programmer now either- I work in sales- but it's cool to think back then how I learned HTML myself and how to create tables and make links and create email links, etc. I should be quite proud of myself that I learned all that back then before there were all these online resources od Dummy/Idiot books published and out there.... But of course by today's standards- my Geocities site blows-- you can still do Geocities, but they have SiteBuilder and all these other WYSIWIG editors to build a personal site. But it's still a very fun trip down memory lane to see this site- and it's funny that mostly everything still works on it, althought the mail address is long gone- and I cannot log into geocities to change anything- but I don't think I want to. This is an ancient artifact that should be preserved.

So, for shits and giggles, check this out. Check out the backgrounds, the animated gifs and all the old school personal website stuff.

Looking back at my content, it's actually funny because I still drink at the bar I did back then. I started the site in 1997 and I guess the last time I updated it was after I turned 21. Now, I'm about 30.



The "guest book" which is pretty much an obsolete thing nowadays, is pretty funny too-- it brings back a lot of memories-- it's before SEO was really big and there is this one guy who searched for "donna radio" because he was from some foreing country and that was a station there, and I came up. So, I had searchable keywords back then! hehe

Cheers to Yahoo Geocites!! Haha. Anyway- just wanted to share it. Laugh with me, because it is funny.

No comments: