http://www.archive.org/web/geocities.php

(We've already got fairly good coverage, both historically and in extra crawls of the last couple months that don't yet appear in the Wayback Machine. But we're not sure we have everything, so if any sites are especially important to you, please nominate them.)

A grey, Times New Roman page 'About My Life' might not have seemed exciting to anyone else, but it was the same 'wow, I made that!' moment as the first time a BASIC program printed my name across the screen.

(On reflection, many of these beginnings are egotistical, aren't they?)

It strikes me that Kids These Days Don't Have It So Good. Stuff is complex now. A page with nowt but a <title> and <h1> tag looks rubbish. Back in the day, everything looked rubbish so your first page actually looked kinda cool. Obfuscating the real work through helpful frameworks and builders does help one get started, but there's always the sense that it's not really the same as starting from nothing.

I do wonder what the current, or immediate, equivalent to those magic first steps might be.

    <SCRIPT LANGUAGE='SCHEME'>
    (define (eval exp env)
      (cond ((self-evaluating? exp) exp)
            ((variable? exp) (lookup-variable-value exp env))
            ((quoted? exp) (text-of-quotation exp))
            ((assignment?  exp) (eval-assignment exp env))
            ((definition? exp) (eval-definition exp env))
            ((if? exp) (eval-if exp env))
            ((lambda? exp) (make-procedure (lambda-parameters exp) (lambda-body exp) env))
            ((begin? exp) (eval-sequence (begin-actions exp) env))
            ((cond? exp) (eval (cond->if exp) env))
            ((application? exp)  (apply (eval (operator exp) env) (list-of-values (operands exp) env)))
            (else (error "Common Lisp or Netscape Navigator 4.0+ Required" exp))))
    </SCRIPT>

I'm not a sculptor, and if I attempted to create a marble bust it would surely look terrible. That doesn't mean I think it's a good sculpture, it just means that's the best I know how to do, so it works for me.

I do think that the bad design of these sites speaks more to the importance of "form after function". Maybe GeoCities pages were hideous, but they still enabled people to post their pictures/thoughts/etc in a way that most couldn't have figured out before that.

To extend your metaphor, you're not merely carving a marble bust, you're also gluing on trinkets and coating it with glitter and plastering it with stickers.

I'm not at all dismissing the importance of MySpace and GeoCities and et al; I just think it's useful to look at them as a large body of research for the difference between professional and amateur design tastes.

I sometimes marvel at how much of history is "lost to the ages", even from the relatively recent past (i.e. ~1000 yrs). I find myself sometimes wondering if something similar might happen 1000 years from today. I can't say for sure, but I certainly think it's possible.

    <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="QBASIC">IF $BROWSER = "IE" THEN GOTO 50</SCRIPT>

  GOTO 10

Yep. Spot on!