Once on the web, always on the web!

Back in 1996, a community formed that allowed pioneers of the worldwide web to share information and ideas about their passions. In 1999 Yahoo the owner of the site name deleted all of the web pages on the server. The community was called Geocities and the websites created by the members were an early attempt to understand and to use the web to communicate with like minds. I became aware of Geocities in 1996 when I was leading the development of an Information Technology curriculum in my Province for grades K to 12. The existence of this community was one of the reasons, we built in the study of the Internet from grades 4 to 7 and grades 8 to grade 12 when we created the curriculum.  In 1997,  I created my own Geocities page for students, teachers, travellers, and business owners.  When the sites were deleted, I thought my site had been destroyed, along with all of the others.

In many ways, the ideas behind the development of the communities of Geocities are similar to the communities being built in beBee today. The members of the Geocities communities like the members of the beBee community were/are able to share with like-minded people for free, their ideas, visions, hopes, fears, and passions The beBee platform is much more sophisticated than the platform we used. In the mid 90's web sites were created by code. Browsers like Chrome, Edge, or Internet Explorer did not exist or were just being created,  so there were few images or animations used, and we thought in terms of the World Wide Web, not the Internet. We were building a community where new ideas were explored, new thoughts created and fun was important just as the members of beBee are doing today.

So I was surprised when I received an email from a person who had seen my old Geocities website and then had sent me an email asking if I could update my site to include her information. I did a search and I was surprised and delighted to find that a group of web historians have taken the time and energy to recover many of the old Geocities websites.  I thought my work lost. For those interested in the history or Geocities or looking at the sites recovered you can go to the Wayback Machine and do a search for Geocities or you can go to another site Reocities.  On the Reocities page, they say: We've rebuilt the walls to the Cities and the streets where a large part of the early settlers of the World Wide Web used to live in. You can still find them where they were before, but not all of the houses have been rebuilt yet.  

I am happy that they have done this work as they have recovered and rebuilt, some of my rooms to the house I built at Geocities, so in a sense, I have been reborn.  I did not realise that I was one of the early settlers of the Web, but I am delighted that some of the rooms of my house were recovered. All of the links don't work and I have no way of editing them, but this find does bring back some very positive memories. So if you want to take a look at some of my very early work on the Web (back in the mid to late 90's) go here or go to the Internet Archive here, where you can watch how I transformed the site from when the site was first archived to when it was last changed. Once on the web always on the web.

My welcome to visitors (similar to a profile in beBee) to my house built at Geocities, had the following information so I thought I would share it here:

I am within ten years of my retirement, and as I look back over my work history, I take pride in the number of diversified careers I have enjoyed.  I have actually worked in seven of the occupations listed below, but I will leave it to your imagination to decide which ones I really worked at and which ones I made up. However, enjoy the humour of the following as it sums up some of my thoughts towards work and where it can take us.

• My first job was working in an orange juice factory, but I got canned ... couldn't concentrate.
• Then I worked in the woods as a lumberjack, but I just couldn't hack it, so they gave me the axe.
• After that, I tried to be a tailor, but I just wasn't suited for it.
• Then I decided to become a Travel Agent, but I found the work too foreign.
• Next, I tried working in a muffler factory but that was exhausting.
• I tried working as a retail store manager but I was always losing the inventory.
• Next was a job in a shoe factory; I tried but I just didn't fit in.
• I became a professional fisherman but discovered that I couldn't live on my net income.
• I tried becoming a consultant but no-one would listen to me.
• I managed to get a good job working for a pool maintenance company, but the work was just too draining.
• I tried politics once, but since I could only be truthful, my downfall was inevitable, and I didn't last long.
• So then I got a job in a gymnasium, but they said I wasn't fit for the job.
• I got a job as a historian until I realised there was no future in it.
• Just for the HTML of IT, I tried web design but I kept forgetting my (java) script.
• I finally landed a job as a teacher but they said I had no class.
• So I am now considering retiring because I think I would be perfect for that job