Ah, the days of our youth. AOL was king and dial-up was its queen. No one could pick up a phone without completely disconnecting the internet. Images took approximately an hour to load and forget videos. Videos were a thing of the future and we could not yet see how vital Youtube would become or how cats on the internet would become a universal language that broke barriers. Things were primitive and amazing. We marveled at what we could find on the internet as we tested Instant Messengers. Under the panic of possibilities, teachers were keen on students learning how to make a website. Odds are great that many of us practiced basic HTML on tiny personal sites, hosted on GeoCities or Angelfire.

Fond memories of broken images and square websites that could only use Times New Roman, Courier, or Comic Sans fill many of our heads when we hear the word “GeoCities”. There’s a whole new generation on the internet, however, so for those who don’t understand, here’s a brief run-down: GeoCities was a web-hosting service created by Yahoo. It was simple, and anyone could create a page. Founded around 1995, it even predates LiveJournal by a few years. It looks like an absolute antique next to Myspace or Facebook, but it served similar purposes. People created a page, loaded it up with whatever content they wanted (or could get), and socialized with one another. The creative would choose their page’s color scheme or get fancy and give it a patterned background, but that’s really it. In short, GeoCities was pretty ugly. It was a mess of sprites, .jpgs, ugly fonts, clashing backgrounds, and flashing text, and we loved it.

That isn’t to say that anyone regrets how far we’ve come. Those truly nostalgic for the old times might want to take a look at the GeoCities-izer. It’s a site that can turn just about any other website into a mess worthy of the mid-1990s. It’s almost gloriously terrible. The site even showcases its version of Youtube, the New York Times, and Boing Boing. Here's Joonbug for the curious! Spoiler: It's terrifying.

 

Test out your favorites here and feel just how much we’ve improved over the years!