Goatcounter and the Pursuit of Geocities Nostalgia

In 1997, I had a Geocities website. For anyone who doesn’t know, Geocities would host your personal website for free. All kinds of people jumped on this opportunity, and the diversity of sites was incredible. For perspective, at the time I would look for websites on cereal boxes just to find places to go on the web (kelloggs.com, keep on keeping on). Geocities placed you in a “city”, which grouped the sites by topic. Some example cities:

Area51 for Sci-fi and conspiracy theories

RodeoDrive for shopping

Nashville for country music

CapitolHill for politics

WestHollywood for LGBT topics

SiliconValley for tech

Beneath each of the cities were “neighborhoods”. Once you joined a neighborhood you were assigned a 4-digit number, and together that made up your URL:

http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/Dell/1015/

(This site is now available at https://geocities.restorativland.org/EnchantedForest/Dell/1015/ …personally I love it.)

I’m sure you have seen a few examples of these 90s-ass sites, the style is simple but charming in its naivete. The sites were characterized by tiled backgrounds, not much in the way of font design, webrings (discover new related sites yb clicking through the ring), guestbooks, these little 88x31 buttons:

a small grey rectangular button that says “Best viewed with Open Eyes” and a yellow smiley face a small maroon button that says FREE vertically on the left side, with the rest saying “built listening to Winamp” horizontally a button that says -Take back the web- with the firefox logo on the right , and lots of blinking text and animated gifs:

A tabby cat on a pillow, it is animated and breathing A rainbow inchworm moving along a bouquet of flowers with a flapping butterfly near it

There was always an Under Construction notice with some variation of this lil dude: a spinning diamond-shaped construction sign with a black stick figure digging

My very favorite thing, however, was the visitor counter: a counter that looks like a digital clock with green numbers showing 01337

The ancient ancestor of Google Analytics, it did one thing. It counted pageviews. People were seeing your site! Like 10 people so far and one more visited yesterday omg! More on webcounters later.

In the prime years of Geocities, I was 11 years old and this whole internet thing seemed absolutely magical. Guess what! I recently found evidence of my website. The website I made. In 1997. I hope you are excited af, I was when I found this.

Are you ready?

My beloved book. “HTML 3.2, Visual quick reference, Third Edition.”

Here’s my copy:

My hand holding the book “HTML 3.2, Visual quick reference, Third Edition.”

I guess my coding passion started early. The book is totally available on Open Library if you want to check it out: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL705328M/HTML_3.2_visual_quick_reference

Now, let’s open the book:

The inside of the book with a blacked out rectangle at the top and the url http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/Dell/5111

MY NAME (REDACTED BUT TRUST ME). AND MY URL. MY REAL URL. (Also some kind of 6-character all-lowercase-letter password…simpler times)

Unfortunately I can’t find my site anywhere online these days, The Geocities Gallery and the old standby The Internet Archive Wayback Machine did not capture its brief moment in the sun.

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Goatcounter and the Pursuit of Geocities Nostalgia

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