geocities on S Anand

A challenge of blog questions

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 11:13:55 +0000

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.

In July 1999, as a student at IIMB, I decided to put that into action by creating a custom HTML page updated manually.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

WordPress. Because it was the most fully-featured, mature platform when I migrated to it around 2006.

Before that, I used:

A custom HTML page on Geocities. But it was hard to update multiple links, create individual pages, categories, etc. So…
A Perl-based static-site generator I wrote myself. But as my link count grew, each generation took too long. So …
A CGI-Perl-based blogging engine I hosed on freestarthost.com, handling commenting, etc. But at BCG, I didn’t have time to add many features (linkback, RSS, etc.) So…
Blogger as a parallel blog, briefly. But it didn’t have as many features as (nor the portability of) WordPress. So…
WordPress - moving across a bunch of hosting services, and currently on HostGator.
I also blogged in parallel on InfyBlog, Infosys’ internal blogging platform on LiveJournal.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

I started with custom HTML in Emacs (or whatever code editor I kept moving to).

Briefly, I used Windows Live Writer, which was quite a good blogging tool.

Now, I write in Markdown on VS Code and paste it into WordPress’ editor.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When an idea that’s been bubbling for a while in my mind bursts out.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I publish immediately.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

The next chapter of my life, which I wrote on a one-way flight back from the UK to India to start Gramener.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I plan to move it to GitHub Pages with Markdown content and a static site generator. I might write my own SSG again in Deno or use one of the faster ones.

Who’s next?

I’d love to hear from

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 10:50:57 +0000

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?

Google Maps API

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 12:00:00 +0000

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

200531

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 12:00:00 +0000

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

Google queries that lead to my site

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 12:00:00 +0000

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”?

My page on the Internet Archive

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 12:00:00 +0000

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

No site has linked to my page

Fri, 31 May 2002 12:00:00 +0000

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

Sat, 20 Apr 2002 12:00:00 +0000

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.)

Time travel anamolies

Tue, 19 Mar 2002 12:00:00 +0000

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?

No FTP on Geocities

Fri, 01 Mar 2002 12:00:00 +0000

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

Wed, 16 Jan 2002 12:00:00 +0000

MSN messenger emoticons.

Am I jobless

Mon, 03 Dec 2001 12:00:00 +0000

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.

Data transfer status exceeded

Thu, 01 Nov 2001 12:00:00 +0000

I wonder what caused this…

From: civics@geocities.com
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.

Website updated

Tue, 14 Aug 2001 12:00:00 +0000

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

Site design

Sun, 05 Aug 2001 12:00:00 +0000

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.

Yahoo add-ons

Tue, 17 Jul 2001 12:00:00 +0000

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.