Geocities lives on as Oocities

Some of you may recall that last summer Yahoo shut down Geocities, its free web hosting service. And with it went an untold amount of information posted by uncounted little people like yours truly. For those of you who care about such things, today I stumbled across oocities.com, the site that archived much of the Geocities content before it was flushed down the Internet’s virtual drain.

Oddly enough, the folks there felt as I did — that you shouldn’t just up and destroy a huge chunk of Internet content. At the very least it creates a nightmare of broken links in a system dependent on interconnectedness. And just because Geocities was free and mostly a virtual Amateur Hour doesn’t mean there wasn’t some very worthwhile and interesting material posted there.

The plan is to eventually make all former Geocities pages accessible again by simply changing “geocities” in the old URLs to “oocities.” I was pleased to note that my little contribution to Internet history has been restored, although some of the internal graphics links are broken, probably the result of my horrendous coding.

Anyway, a tip of the hat to Oocities and the dedicated folks working over there, and a heads up to you who might be looking for an old Geocities site.