Well, Yahoo finally did it. They shut down GeoCities, just as they said they would. Not that most people would even miss it nowadays, but nevertheless...a bit of internet history has evaporated.
Now, for many years I maintained and updated a GeoCities page devoted to Michigan's "thumb" region...a page I titled "Harbor Beach Forever". The main page can probably be found somewhere in one of the Internet Archive sites, but the photos attached to the links therein are probably lost forever. And although I knew that GeoCities' demise was imminent, I never went into the site and saved all those photos to my hard drive.
Bad, William...very, very BAD.
Part of my reasoning was that...well, the photos just weren't that *good* by internet standards anymore. These days, we've gotten spoiled by the wallpaper-sized, pristine, massive megapixel fare that's found on Flickr and the like. The "Harbor Beach Forever" photos were, by comparison, usually no larger than 800 pixels and were often smaller. Some were scanned versions of old 35mm cheap consumer camera film, edited on bareboned photo software and overly edited and sharpened. Those from my early digital camera weren't a whole lot better.
But for its time, the site served its purpose. It helped at least a handful of people discover The Thumb and get to know it better, and no one yet knew or cared that the photos were technically inferior to what was to come. I had fun putting it together, and hey--I think I'm gonna do something cheesy and dedicate this entry to the site's memory.
RIP, Harbor Beach Forever!
