Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Reocities: the GeoCities one-man rescue project

<< < (3/3)

rgdot:
Looking at the page tomos linked one also remembers why there were so many articles and tools  on choosing color schemes.

app103:
My first website was hosted on AOL Hometown (also gone), primarily because it had more disk space than Geocities, unlimited bandwidth, and no hotlink protection on my files. (and for awhile, it was ad free)

I had a site that supplied backgrounds, clip art, and midi hotlink codes, for use on sites like Blogger, Live Journal, Dead Journal and Neopets, which didn't allow uploading files. This was back in the days before there were any free image hosting sites like Imageshack and Photobucket, and people had a lot of trouble finding places to host their files for use on other sites, for free.

I see that Reocities went only for the sites that had the traditional area + number urls. There was a point where Yahoo stopped doing that and site url's were based solely on username, without the area designation.

I guess all of those sites are not included in this archiving effort and it was just limited to the older ones.

Another thing that might have made it more difficult to archive these sites was that Yahoo instituted a 4mb/hour bandwidth limit. If you tried to archive a site bigger than 4mb all at once, you would end up knocking the site out for everyone and having to wait an hour to obtain more of the files. (I ran into this issue when trying to archive a friend's 10mb Geocities site)

This bandwidth limit was common knowledge and was often used to DoS attack sites by downloading them repeatedly till they hit the bandwidth limit. It was also why you couldn't submit any Geocities URL's to Digg.

40hz:
I see that Reocities went only for the sites that had the traditional area + number urls. There was a point where Yahoo stopped doing that and site url's were based solely on username, without the area designation.
-app103 (October 30, 2009, 04:30 PM)
--- End quote ---

All may not be lost. They're not restricting the recovery effort to just what they could 'spider' and snag from the web. Eventually they plan to reach out to GeoCities site owners who succeeded in archiving their sites to help fill in some of the missing pages.

This from the Retrocities homepage:

As time passes, we will try to recover more and more of what was lost, at least as much as is technically possible. If you wish to help with this effort, and you have your old GeoCities content backed up, then please email us at [email protected], but *not* before we've stopped importing the data that we have right now.

--- End quote ---

 8)

app103:
I have been lurking in the Archive Team IRC channel and I am pretty up to date with what is going on now.

It's quite impressive, the amount of data they have collected and are sync'ing. 

There is plans on building a "best of" page, linking to some of the real gems.

They need help with tagging, so if you want to submit some tags, pop them into the box at the top of each page and click the button. What would be especially helpful is if you come across spam sites to tag them as such so they can eventually be removed.

They are already talking about the next big projects (tinyurl & twitter). I am considering volunteering to help with the twitter project and have done a little bit for them already (archived as much as I could get for the 100 most popular users).

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page