Yahoo Geocities will close its long time service, Geocities effective 26 October 09. I’ve created my first geocities site in 2002- and have improved it a few times before migrating to Blogger- when Geocities imposed bandwidth requirements in 2006.
If you are like many others who have began on a geocities site, why not archive your site- after all, it is where most of us have begun our journey of creating our own websites/blogs. It is indeed memorable and to have the entire memory just deleted off from system- it’s sad, rite? And Yahoo Geocities have strictly mentioned that effective 26 October 09, the records of Geocities will be deleted from their servers and cannot be recovered.
And please do it quickly because as of today, the geocities sites are constantly down- I have problem accessing after a few pages and have to come back later to archive it.
Above is the main page of my last updated Geocities website. Even though I’ve not done any updates since early 2007, the site still have page rank 1.
Don’t Depend on Internet Archive to do the job for you
An internet archive site seemed to be crawling and archiving all the geocities site. But a search using my site showed that the records were not updated at all and the links were not working. If you still want to do keep the memory of your site alive, I would advise that you archive your own site (please read on further for archiving tips)
You need not migrate your site to paid webhosting.
A search via google will show that many webhosting companies are offering paid hosting for you to migrate your geocities site there. If you do not want to migrate to paid webhosting, you can always use free blogging platform like:
- Blogger.com – the layout are not so versitile, unless you know html. But still better than Geocities. At least you are allowed to monetise the site.
- WordPress.com- lots of nice themes (web layouts) to choose from but you are not allowed to put in advertisements.
- Typepad- sorry, I am not familar with this platform.
In January 08, I’ve shifted some of my contents to blogger platform from my geocities site: http://expressingcreativity.blogspot.com/. I could not retain the layout that I had in Geocities- basically I manually reupload the pictures and contents. And previously I’ve featured some astrology articles which I’ve migrated to http://yinteing.blogspot.com/. I migrated the astrology quite sometime because returning visitors had complained of not being able to access to the geocities due to bandwidth problems (each time a visitor goes to your site and download something, they use a certain bandwidth from your quota. And if your site also happens to have a lot of graphic, it also takes from your bandwidth).
How I Plan to Archive My Geocities site
What I would just do is to perform a screen capture and convert the screens into jpeg images. The images will then be transferred to my blogger site– as image files. To make navigation easier, I will create user friendly navigation links to partially duplicate the navigation flow that was found in the original site. I will keep a copy of these captured images in my laptop and another copy in my email (the email allocated size is so huge now, you can keep the files of an entire website in them).
On 2 October 09, I’ve transferred the comments . The rest will be done in stages.
wonderful read, keep up the great work. more writers like you are needed on the net
i have been reading your blog for a bit now, just wanted to say thanks for this. and i have am subscribed to your RSS feed. look forward to reading more from you
I have migrated my Geocities site to two new hosts – Webring and Ucoz. The Webring migration was simpler and every page displays correctly. The Ucoz migration was complicated and pages in Chinese display in garbage text. Maybe that can be fixed. Anyway Ucoz offers a lot of functions for free – even FTP, which you had to pay for at Yahoo-Geocities. I also downloaded my Geocities web site onto two computers (to be on the safe side) using a program called HTTrack. From there it can be uploaded to another host, if I want.
Jacob, thanks for the suggestion.