Somewhere, in a box in a cupboard (or in my loft), in the back pages of a notepad with various rap lyrics scribbled in it, there are usernames, passwords and web addresses, which if used correctly, would allow you to access the most awesome online content ever made. Or at least, they would’ve done. I’m talking about my first few pages that were hosted on the genius that is/was Geocities. As of yesterday, they are officially no more.
In actuality, I lost track of those pages a long time ago, but in all the years that have passed, I’ve clung to the hope that one day I’ll stumble upon that notepad again and be able to revisit those animated gifs / absurdly compressed Wu-Tang videos / early teen ramblings. I even think there might have been some Jenny McCarthy related content somewhere – that’s how old school it was. I’m pretty sure that I had some pages in ‘Hollywood’, and ‘SunsetStrip’ too. And I definitely remember using ‘Area51′ to host my Real Media files but the specifics escape me.
All I really know for certain is that along with Angelfire & Fortunecity, Geocities helped to make me the web designer that I call myself today. It was in those badly coded, garish, always-black-background sites that I learnt what an ‘a’ tag is and how to embed a wav file that played repeatedly in the background with no option to turn it off. During the day, I’d hand write basic html (with a pen and paper) that I wanted to use, so that in the evening, I could spend as little time as possible on my Dad’s 56k modem updating my pages before someone else in the house tried to make a phone call and killed my glorious work. Not to mention, we were paying by the minute for that connection and my Dad thought I was using it for ‘research’ for homework and whatnot, so any glimpses of a slowly progressively downloading 200kb image of Ol Dirty Bastard were met with a disapproving frown.
I stopped using Geocities just after the watermark scandal, and before it got bought out by Yahoo, so it’s been about a decade since those hedonistic glory days.. but there will always be a special place in my heart for Geocities.
Just a test comment. Kindly ignore me.
Or don’t, it’s up to you!
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged.
Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, comes from a line in section 1.10.32.
There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don’t look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn’t anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text.
The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English.
Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy.
Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).