www.geocities.comIt's a sad day when a website is deleted from the internet. There's a sense of loss. Bits of knowledge disappear. All the passionate work the webmaster poored into his or her site vanishes into the abyss of history. Now imagine if you will a genocide of established web pages and sites on a scale so massive that it can only compare to the destruction of Alderaan. Well folks, as Obi-Wan once said, "
I felt a disturbance in the force, as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly extinguished.", that's about to happen sometime later this year. After more than a decade of existence Yahoo has decided to Death Star one of it's greatest free services of all time, free web hosting.
At an as yet undisclosed date later this year Yahoo has announced that GeoCities will come to an end. All of it's tens-of-thousands of hosted websites and pages will instantly be wipped from the existence of the internet, only to become a memory in the minds of all those who ever ran or visited a site hosted there on.
I personally am saddened by this loss to come. It was on GeoCities that I first created my own website, PSO Archive, which has now for the past couple of years been hosted here at Sega Forums. Joe_new's original version of Dreamcast Magic, also hosted here, got it's start on GeoCities, and it was through a primitive message board on that original site that the two of us began to have diologue outside of the confines of DC PSO many mnay years ago.
Even more of a loss is all of the ungleaned knowledge that resides amongst the GeoCities sites. Knowledge that may slip away never to be seen ever again. It got me thinking, and yesterdayt I began a personnal side project to make archival back-ups of many of the PSO related websites using the only viable and automated method to do so, a spider program. Specifically I'm using the best Windows based spider program I've ever used, it's free and can be downloaded from it's official site here:
http://www.httrack.comI strongly advise anyone who wishes to never loose a site of personnal interest to use that program to back it up before it's to late.
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