No More Geocities

It's hard to believe, but I've been creating and maintaining websites for over ten years now. Mind you, this is just a hobby of mine, but its became something I've found to be enjoyable. These days, I don't work on my plethora of websites nearly as much as I used to. In fact, I'm lucky to find the time and the motivation to work on any of the sites. Well, that is going to be changing very soon. I don't have much more time to procrastinate, either. Geocities, the venerable web hosting service, is going out of business this Monday, October 26. In my opinion, ever since Yahoo took over their operations, they haven't been nearly as effective of a web host as they were. But a majority of the pages to my Upper Michigan website still remain on the Geocities servers. And if I don't at least save the content on all of those pages, it'll all be erased on Monday. So I've got some work to do this weekend.

Back when I first became interested in creating websites, I was still in high school. The whole idea of creating your very own website and attracting web-surfers was a very intriguing idea. I remember during my senior year, when I didn't have anything else of importance going on; I would spend time on my high school's computers updating my Upper Michigan website. Back then, it was a pretty simple website. Over the years, I kept adding more and more content, along with spiffing up the pages more than the simple designs they had at the start. But then it got to a point where I felt I did as much as I could with the site and haven't added hardly any new content since. Overall I'd say I'm pretty content with how the Upper Michigan site is. I mean sure, it's not perfect. There are a few things I could add to some of the pages. And even some layout issues exist when someone browses the website with a program other than Internet Explorer. I can't say I'm an expert when it comes to building websites. I'd still say I'm very much of an amateur. However, I've learned quite a bit about website design since I've started this whole thing over ten years ago. Yet, there's always fine tuning that can be done.

Another web project I started during my late high school and early college years was a fan page honoring the classic television program Leave it to Beaver. Back when TV Land didn't air the junk that currently infiltrates its channel, they aired the greatest classic shows. One of those programs was "Emergency!," a show that depicted firemen from Los Angeles County in California becoming paramedics, essentially launching the paramedic program in the United States. Well, following that program was Leave it to Beaver. Almost instantly, I grew hooked to the show that originally started back in 1957. My interest in the show would launch my idea to create a Leave it to Beaver fan page. The site became quite popular at the end of its existence. I was constantly getting e-mail from fellow fans, asking a variety of questions about the show. I even launched a message board that was getting to be quite the gathering place for fans to ask questions about particular show topics to other fans. But the Leave it to Beaver website train came to a crashing halt when the site became inaccessible one day. I tried logging in, but it wouldn't accept my password. I soon came to the conclusion that the site had been hacked and deleted. One of my biggest regrets was not having a tougher password - which was incredibly easy. It ultimately lead to the Leave it to Beaver website's demise. Maybe if I pursued it enough, I could've possibly gotten it back. But I thought my chances of that happening were pretty slim to none. So I pressed on, even if it was without the Leave it to Beaver site.

The next adventure that proved to be very worthwhile for me was creating another fansite; this time for a cartoon. Back in 2003, Nickelodeon launched a spin-off show of the Rugrats called "All Grown Up." It was a show that aged the Rugrats cast approximately nine years. Remember that in Rugrats, the kids were babies and toddlers. In the AGU series, they were nine to 12 years old. The show became so enjoyable to watch, that I decided to share my joy with other potential fans by creating a fansite. It soon became "Luke's All Grown Up Fansite" and for a time was the most popular AGU site on the web. The success of the site was soon realized once the corresponding message board began to take on more and more members. At the message board's peak, I had about 400 members, with a good chunk of those members being active. The website itself was becoming inaccessible far too often because of the traffic, so I had to start paying for a hosting package through Yahoo Geocities. I still had issues with YG, so I basically had to transfer every page over to a new host. Even with the new host, I still didn't go completely trouble-free with the AGU site. There was a time when I lost a variety of files, including some pages for absolutely no reason. So I had to rebuild those pages from scratch - sometimes even going off information from the top of my head. The AGU site is still out there, even though not as many people clamour for information regarding the NickToon anymore. I've thought about ending the site altogether, but then I'd feel the show wouldn't get properly remembered. So for now, it stays. And I still fondly remember the good times I had with that particular site. It gave me quite a reputation within the All Grown Up circle.

All of these websites, including my site about my hometown, all had their start on Geocities. And even though I've been gradually moving away from Geocities over the years, I'm still grateful to the service for allowing me to become interested in webpage building. At the time when I started building sites, it was the best webhost out there. Nowadays, it's certainly lost its edge which is why Yahoo is closing it down. As the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. And I've got to say, Geocities gave me one heck of a ride.

The Upper Michigan Informer
Luke's All Grown Up Fansite
The Chatham, MI Information Page