Sunday, July 11, 2010

News: Geocities Archive

Many of us mourned the loss of Geocities. The FLGenWeb Project County Coordinators made every effort to save the Florida genealogical sites. One brave man went even further. He has archived most of the old Geocities at http://reocities.com/newhome/. The Internet Archive also has many of the sites and assisted in the project.

Please note the clever new name. You can correct all your broken Geocities links by simply changing the "G" in the URL to "r". Firefox users can install a javascript program from reocities that will do this automagically.

Jacques Mattheij's journal of his huge accomplishment is here: http://reocities.com/newhome/makingof.html.

In his petition to Yahoo, Jacques says, "It [Geocities] was a monument that stood as testimony to the birth of the World Wide Web, something that will surely occupy the scholars of the future. To Yahoo! it may have simply been a bunch of bits on some hard disks. But to humanity it was much more than that."

"In the name of commerce culture was destroyed."

For us they also destroyed thousands of genealogies and family histories. Now, most of it is safe.

Thank you Jacques! Thank you very much!