Sometime between 7pm and 9pm GMT today, GeoCities finally closed down. Many of us have fond/embarassing memories of the service that provided us with our first web presence. In commemoration, I've put up a reconstruction of one of the earliest incarnations of my GeoCities site. It's cobbled together from files scattered around my hard disk, so it may not be a perfect snapshot. Apart from some minor changes to get them to work, though, each page is entirely original.

As you may be able to guess, I was a little bit of a Doctor Who fan.

Retro clichés to look out for: animated GIFs, embedded MIDI, web rings, "best viewed with netscape navigator 3.0 or better," and JavaScript gimmicks. Watch out for an actual example of the Millennium Bug (which, interestingly, Firefox and Internet Explorer deal with differently). For the web developers among you, check out the source code and stare in a disbelieving manner at the funky JavaScript.

In my defence, I was 13 at the time. And, who knows? Maybe a decade from now, the current site will seem appallingly ill-conceived.

Returning to the present for a moment, I feel compelled by GeoCities-esque "neighbourly" duty to mention a few of my friends' websites. First up is Spotify.fm, a service which tells you when music by your last.fm artists is released on Spotify. After that, there's Very Top Five, which is amusing.