Under construction and out of style

In case you didn’t realize it, October 27, 2009, was a day that the Internet changed forever.
It was the day when a million voices were silenced.
It was a day when a little piece of our collective consciousness slipped away.
On that day, Yahoo! officially pulled the plug on GeoCities, it’s formerly uber-popular Web-site building platform.

By the time of its death, Geocities had been on life-support for years. Like many early Internet fads, having one’s own Web site was the thing to do. (In fact, at the time of the plug-pulling, this writer had three GeoCities sites up. And thanks to the WayBacK Machine, here’s the main page for one!)

These sites were the precursor to blogs. They were our public soap boxes before Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. They were everyone’s gold-rush claim on the Net.
But now that’s all gone. The bazillion megabytes dedicated to Sailor Moon, X-Files, Pokemon and any other late 1990s pop-culture fad has slipped into oblivion.

But one site, TextFiles.com, has done its duty to the community by saving one thing that was seemingly common to every single GeoCities site in existence:  The “Under Construction” animated gif.

Yes, for posterity’s sake this simple “museum page” has corralled as many of those silly little things as they could, and you can see what they saved by going here.

Oh, GeoCities, how we miss your unfinished pages. How we long for your broken links and neon-green text. We weep for your fanfic.

But at least we still have those cute little yellow-and-black animations.