That old GeoCities site I found made me actually sad

I was cleaning out my bookmarks from like 2007 and stumbled onto this old GeoCities page someone made for their pet hamster. It had a guestbook, a MIDI file of "All Star" playing automatically, and these terrible clip art stars everywhere. The person wrote a whole story about how they saved up allowance money for two months to buy the hamster. What got me was the last update in 2009 where they said the hamster passed away and thanked visitors for being "part of the journey." That little corner of the internet is probably gone now, buried under some corporate site or just a 404 error. It hit me how much genuine effort people put into these weird personal spaces online, and now it's just lost. Did anyone else ever have a dumb little site like that as a kid that you poured way too much time into?

2 comments

2 Comments

wade_young8625d ago

Man I totally get what you mean. It's like finding an old shoebox of photos you forgot you had but way more personal somehow. People put so much of themselves into those goofy little websites and it's all just gone now. It reminds me of how we leave behind these little pieces of ourselves everywhere we go online but we don't even think about it until something like this pops up. It's kind of like how we used to leave notes in library books or carve initials in trees - just trying to say "I was here" even if nobody sees it later.

richardharris25d ago

I mean yeah it's kind of a bummer but is a kid's hamster website really that deep? People have been making weird stuff on the internet forever and most of it was always going to disappear eventually. Doesn't mean the time spent on it wasn't worth something at the moment though, right?

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