geocities 16

Thejesh tagged me with these questions. Why did you start blogging in the first place? I started my website in 1997 on Geocities at https://www.geocities.com/root_node/, mostly talking about me. (A cousin once told me, “Anand’s site is like TN Seshan - talking only about himself.” 🙂) (As an aside, I didn’t know that searching for Geocities on Google renders the results in Comic Sans!) I wanted a place to share the interesting links I found. Robot Wisdom by John Barger and Scripting News by Dave Winer were great examples: collection of interesting links updated daily. ...

For a second, I thought I’d been hacked. If you search for “Geocities” on Google, it shows the results in a Comic Sans font. https://www.google.com/search?q=geocities Turns out it’s an easter egg by Google that’s about 8 months old. Are there any Geocities homesteaders here? Or is LinkedIn too new for the old-timers? LinkedIn

Google Maps API. But for some reason, it doesn’t work on Geocities. Related links: Google Maps Mania, London Traffic (and cameras)

When I use the URL http://www.geocities.com/root_node/?200531 to view my site, it doesn’t show the Yahoo! ad bar on the right. But when I use any other number, like http://www.geocities.com/root_node/?200530, or load it plain, like http://www.geocities.com/root_node, it doesn’t work. I suspect the 200531 is related to today’s date (2005 Mar 31), that it changes every day, and that this feature is used by one of Firefox’s ad blockers. Comments Jetru 31 Mar 2005 9:15 am: Cool! Jetru 31 Mar 2005 9:25 am: Hey, your search searches the html. S Anand 1 Apr 2005 3:51 am: It does use dates. On April 1, I have to use 20051 instead of 200531 S Anand 1 Apr 2005 3:52 am: Yes, Jetru – the search box does a regular expression search of all HTML

Why am I the second hit on Google for queries like “arabic food’s pictures”, “wedding pictures in chennai in geocities”, and “iim grads future”?

The Internet Archive has archived my page as of Aug 2001. The site hasn’t changed much since then.

Almost no site has linked to my page. (I sort of like that a bit. It means the 30-odd hits a day that I get are from people who TYPE my URL.)

Star Trek scripts. All 10 of them. Makes me nostalgic. (Please don’t overload the site: it’s hosted on Geocities and has exceeded its transfer limit.)

Here’s a good reason for me not to advertise my website. Here’s a site on time travel anamolies in films, which is not accessible, thanks to Yahoo’s restrictions on data transfer. One listing on Metafilter probably killed the site. But then, the question probably is, is that a reason to hate Yahoo?

I hate this. “Beginning April 2, 2002, we – Geocities – will no longer provide FTP access as part of our free home page service.” Nice of them to let me know well in advance, though.

MSN messenger emoticons.

Lots of people are wondering if I’m so jobless to have the time to update my site. Trust me, I work every weekend to make sure I have enough material for it.

I wonder what caused this… From: [email protected] Subject: Your Data Transfer Status Congratulations, your website seems to be very popular and has been receiving a large amount of traffic. Our records indicate that you’re using more than the allotted amount of data transfer we provide for a free web site, which is 3 gigabytes per month (measured on an hourly basis). That means that during the past few days we had to temporarily turn your site off to keep the bandwidth within this limit. ...

SOME people have updated their website, and done a jolly decent job of it too. ONE may appreciate that.

My site actually has pretty bad design against these parameters. Need to work on it. Besides, the time is up for static sites. Dynamic website design will rule. Wonder when Geocities will start offering these features.

I’m fiddling around with Yahoo’s add-ons like guestbook, site stats, etc. Don’t be surprised to see wierd things popping up on my page.