A brisk, nostalgic look at how GeoCities and Angelfire shaped the early personal web. This comparative analysis traces origins, features, culture, decline, and lasting influence - and explains why messy, pixelated homepages mattered more than we thought.
A practical, hands-on guide to building a Neo‑GeoCities site in 2023: keep the blinking GIFs, tiled backgrounds, and guestbooks - but host them with modern tools. Includes cultural context, step‑by‑step instructions, code snippets, and hosting options.
Internet Explorer wasn't just a browser - it was a time machine. Its quirks, dominance, and backward-compatibility turned the early web into a living museum of glittery homepages, Flash experiments, and stubborn old code.
Angelfire was a formative playground for a generation of web creators. This piece traces how its quirky constraints taught core web skills, seeded design habits still visible today, and left a cultural afterimage that resurfaces in modern 'retro web' movements.
GeoCities gave millions a blank page and a neighborhood map - the result was an era of wildly personal sites, grassroots communities and a DIY aesthetic that still echoes in today's social media. This post explores how GeoCities enabled identity-building online, the cultural practices it spawned, and what modern platforms can learn from that patchwork web.