After years of rumors, Yahoo has finally decided to close Geocities sometime this year.
I can’t say I’ll miss GeoCities itself — but there are still a lot of sites connected to comics fandom hosted there. Some are kept current, some are old but still contain useful information, and some are snapshots of an earlier era of online fandom
It was a time before MySpace and Twitter and Facebook. Before Google and Wikipedia. Before “weblog” was shortened to “blog,” back when discussions took place not on forums but on IRC, newsgroups and mailing lists, and even having an email address meant you were kind of weird. Everyone with a website belonged to 2 or 3 webrings, fan sites handed out awards to each other regularly, and Jonah Weiland’s name always appeared in front of “Comic Book Resources.” It was still worth asking your local store for a copy of Comic Shop News, because it wasn’t just a digest of last month’s Newsarama articles.
At the time I started Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning (on a server provided by my college) in the mid-1990s, a lot of comics fan sites were on Geocities, including several that I helped out with. The first profiles I made of Flash villains were written for the long-gone Scarlet Speedster website, and I remember contributing bios to an Impulse site at one point as well.
Of course fan sites appear and disappear all the time. I watched a lot of fan sites die out during the late 1990s as people graduated from schools, started jobs, went into the military or just stopped posting. As various Flash sites fell by the wayside, I expanded the scope on my own site to fill the gaps they left. (Evidently I had too much time on my hands.) After a while it was kind of a last-site-standing situation, until Dixon relaunched Crimson Lightning (originally a review site) as a blog a few years ago. It’s nice to see a resurgence of Flash fan sites lately.
As for the sites still on Geocities today: some, especially the ones that are still active, will no doubt move over the next few months. Others will simply vanish, taking with them a piece of fandom history.
Was Central City in the site? If so,. How did they say to get there?
I’m not sure what you mean. Do you mean, was there a “neighborhood” on Geocities called Central City? Not to my knowledge.
The cities in Geocities weren’t really cities, so much as they were categories. Sci-Fi themed sites went in the Area51 neighborhood, Food sites went in NapaValley, etc. Here’s a list of all the neighborhoods and their “suburbs.”
Wow. That’s kind of sad. I remember going to lots of fan sites years and years ago that were on geocities. That’s a shame, internet history gone. I’ll have to go back and search some of the old fan sites, and maybe print out some of the more memorable stuff.
But, on the bright side, at least your site is up and still active, and is in no danger of going away. That would suck.