Let us take a moment to bow our heads in silence for the passing of a very dear friend, Geocities.

When I first read that horrible message greeting Geocities fans upon logging in, the one that announced, “GeoCities is closing on October 26, 2009,” I knew tragedy had struck, although I was happy to know that at least I would have a few good months left with my dear friend. But the world kept spinning madly on, and, at last, the day arrived. Today. The day before the death of Geocities.

I’ll give you a few moments to dry your tears, because it’s difficult to read the screen when your vision is obscured by sorrow. No need to tell me that you haven’t been crying, it’s just been raining on your face. I empathize with your distress. How come we’ve reached this fork in the road, and yet it cuts like a knife?

Okay, all exaggeration (and Flight of the Conchords lyrics) aside, I am pretty sad to see Geocities go. I doubt I would have even logged onto it in the past few years had I not known it would be shut down soon, but it was nice having it out there, because so much of my early teen years was spent on that site.

I actually hated Geocities at first. I was a hardcore Homestead fan and refused to use Geocities, mostly on the grounds that I didn’t like its pagebuilder as much (these were the days before I knew anything about HTML), so, as a result, I came to Geocities pretty late in the game, probably around 2000 or so. I don’t have a screencap of my first Geocities site (on this computer at least), but I remember it being light blue with small Verdana font and a picture of me water-skiing. That soon transformed into a two-frame site with navigation at the top and a few pages of content, and eventually that site turned into *starsparkle* (what a quality name), for which I bought the domain Star-Sparkle.net in January 2002 and still own today. What’s funny is that even after I owned the domain with hosting, I still kept most of my files on Geocities because I was so used to using it. Classy.

Even though that was the first Geocities site I had, the first one I really used was SVJHNet, a fansite for the book series Sweet Valley Junior High (yeah, super awesome), which I co-owned with this girl from Washington named Jessica. I don’t remember how I ended up co-owning the site with her, but she knew some HTML while I was still using Geocities Pagebuilder, but I began looking at the coding for the pages she had designed, and, from that, I figured out HTML, which would end up being a very handy tool for years to come. That site is probably my favorite Geocities memory, just because I learned so much from it. I think that was early 2001-ish, when I was 11/12. I had been into web design for a few years before that, but learning HTML was definitely much more legit. I believe svjh.net was also my first domain (it forwarded to the Geocities page), so that’s another fun milestone. It cost $35 for a year of domain registration, which, geez, that’s expensive, considering I registered kirstiej.com for a year for $1.09.

Aside from those two, I had a ton of other sites, ranging from other fansites to award sites to “cliques” (the early version of fanlistings, I guess, but I guess even fanlistings are rather passé now) and tons of other sites. Sadly, in my attempt to archive them all before tomorrow, I found that many of them were deleted off the Geocities servers. I would have loved to have them all for nostalgic purposes. At least I have the few I found.

So, Geocities, my dear friend, thank you for the years of fun and all that you taught me. You were a huge part of my life years ago, and I wish you a very fond farewell.