Creating Geocities Websites
A search for the book I thought no one wanted.
One day my friend tasked me with creating a website for them. It shouldn’t have been hard for me, I’ve created websites for many people. I’ve used WordPress, SquareSpace, Shopify, Wix, Cargo, BlueHost, MailChimp, and Milkshake App—just to name a few. After landing on the platform I thought would be best suited for my friend’s website, I began with a pre-made theme that most closely matched what I wanted from the page. Then came the customization--a process I like to call “hacking the theme,” and as I overthought how big the logo should be in the header, whether I wanted marquee-scrolling text across the page, and which icon would be best suited for a blinking cursor, I wondered if building places on the internet had always been this much of a struggle for the indecisive.
I thought back to the days of LiveJournal, Xanga, and Blogger, but that wasn’t far enough. I traveled back, and back, and back through my relationship with the internet which has lasted more than half of my life, until I landed on the pitstop of the late ‘90s when everyone I knew had a GeoCities page. For the life of me, I have no idea what anyone’s GeoCities page was about back then—-not even my own.
What did middle schoolers in New Jersey need websites for? I guess we’ll never know.
Building websites at that time was a totally new concept for the mainstream pre-teen. How did we even figure it out? We weren’t developers with extensive knowledge of HTML. I’d often wondered the same thing about the video games my best friend’s brothers used to play. How did they always figure out the out hard parts? Was there some secret society of video gamers who met up and traded cheats? Maybe there was a message board, an AIM public chat room. I never saw any evidence, and yet they always made it to the games’ credits.
I searched “Geocities Page Setup” in Google hoping to relearn exactly what it was like to use Yahoo!’s web building platform to create, organize, and promote content 25 years ago, and hopefully see how it differed from today.
The first search results I was served were enough to make me stop looking: thousands of screenshots of once-thriving GeoCities websites. Going down a K-hole of browsing these websites could keep anyone off track for hours—-and I would follow suit, but on another day (okay let me just visit one).
As I kept on searching, somewhere along the way I came across an actual book that had been published to help people set up their GeoCities pages. Creating GeoCities Websites, it was called, written by Ben Sawyer and Dave Greely. I needed a copy of this book and assumed it would be easy to find, because who would be looking for that now?
I browse the book sections regularly at thrift stores and estate sales, hoping to find some epic source of inspiration, but I’m usually let down. You always find the same books in these sections—-books that everyone’s read: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Help. Everything else on the overstocked shelves, well, I assumed were probably copies of Creating GeoCities Websites that I never knew were there because I’d never been looking for them.
Eventually, I came to find out that I was very, very wrong.
Upon initial research, the status of this book in the resale world was quite confusing. Typically, looking for an old book that you assume no one else is looking for it is quite easy to find, and for a good price. Everywhere I searched for Creating GeoCities Websites led to a dead end. Good Will books, Abe books, Thrift Books, eBay, Amazon, my county library catalog, Craigslist—-no matter where I looked, I either found nothing available, or the resale price was listed at over $50. I even purchased a copy from one of these retailers when I thought I’d found a deal, only to wake up to an email notification that the book was no longer in stock.
For the past year, I have only purchased secondhand clothing. That’s right, nothing new. Not even a sock. My streak is going strong, though challenging, and every time I go to a secondhand store these days, I’m not even trying to find hidden gems; just, anything that will fit that I also like, and my trips are usually short-lived. So, I began making them worth the effort by cruising over to the books after striking out near the pants. With my head cocked 90 degrees, I’d shift my eyes up and down (well, I guess left to right) reading spines, looking for…well I didn’t know what.
Everything I could find about the cover of Creating GeoCities Websites on the internet was simply a stock photo of the front cover—nothing about the back, nothing about the spine. What was I even looking for? I spent hours and hours possessed by finding this book. A sore neck, tired eyes, wasted time behind me, I never found it.
How many hours had I spent looking for something that was never going to be there?
“The day I find this book,” I thought, “will be a day that means something…somehow.”
After months and months of looking for this book everywhere I went, and yearning for a day sopped in meaning because of it, I caved.
I went back to the original eBay listing where I had found the book for sale for $45. “Am I really going to spend $45 on this book when I could hold out for years and get it for $2?” “What would my life be like on that day?” “How old would I be?“ “What would be different about the world?” In some sense, I wanted to wait and have the book find me when it was meant to, but the possibility of having Creating GeoCities Websites at my finger tips within 3-5 business days was so close. To put it like Amazon reviewer, Anthony, did I even want a book that contained “everything I wanted to know about a website that doesn’t exist"?
Yes, yes I did.
Buy now.
While waiting for my coveted book to arrive, I wondered more and more how rare this book might have been. What I discovered was the following.
I came across a message board from a decade ago of people looking for copies.
I found a tweet by another fan.
I found a Hanson (yes, the band) GeoCities-style website that even referenced the book on a subpage which features all books that mention Hanson.
Then, I found an interview from the year 2000 with Creating GeoCities Websites publisher Andy Shafran of Muska & Lipman Publishing Co in the Cincinnati Business Courier.
The company's niche is publishing books on software programs that aren't well known, but have potential for mass-market appeal. It was among the first with a title on MP3 software that allows consumers to download music directly from the Web. — Cincinnati Business Courier
As I read, I continued to get more and more excited about the arrival of this artifact at my doorstep.
When it finally came I was too scared to read it. What if it didn’t live up to my expectations? What if all of this time and energy spent on a not-even-that-old book was a complete waste?
After letting it sit on my coffee table for days, staring at me like a dog waiting to go the bathroom, I turned the front cover over.
On page 8 I learned the official answer to the question “What is GeoCities?” when I thought I’d already known the answer.
GeoCities offers a diverse set of Web communities organized around participants’ interests. Homesteaders post messages, chat, and interact with one another to pursue friendships, commerce, and the sharing of thoughts and ideas. In many ways, GeoCities lets you do many of the things you would do in a real city. You move in, you build a home (your free home page), meet and interact with other people, shop, do business, and have fun—all online.
And to think a beautiful place like this died because they gave away their users’ information to advertisers illegally.
The book, however, provided me with a deep dive into a time and place that no longer exists. Did I ever figure out if creating a GeoCities website required as much dedication as its modern-day counterparts?
The book is over 300 pages long…