Passing Worlds

Sadly, the title of this post puts me in mind of flatulence.  But what it’s actually supposed to refer to is how times change – such as the closing of Yahoo! Geocities, where my modest homepage has been hosted for nearly ten years.

Bandwidth shot up, storage space shot up, user expectations shot up, websites became increasingly elaborate, script-heavy and media-heavy; and Yahoo!’s simple, no-frills services were left behind.  Briefcase, an early take on cloud computing, has already been closed in a nod to how storage capacity and requirement has changed over the last decade; now Geocities will follow in just three months.

I learned to hand-code HTML because of Geocities.  Its low capacity and the occasionally slow connection - it’s a free service, after all – taught me the value of minimalism.  Keeping design elements fuss-free was crucial when you were manually typing in every single hyperlink, table cell, font format tag and image link, and keeping image and sound files small was an unavoidable necessity when the sum total of the storage space available to the site was 15MB.  One music file can be more than that, these days.

Geocities was my first introduction to the new media (new in those days; contemporary now).  I fumbled my way through the basics of web design – you need content, you need a theme, you need organization! – while building my homepage on Geocities.  I developed a short but highly educational passion for my little website.  The thrill of writing a new story or CG’ing a new drawing was matched by the kick I got from posting it to my homepage, framed in a template I had created – theme, style, CSS, everything decided by me right down to the colour of the scroll bar.  Living in a HDB apartment where I didn’t have a room of my own and my parents wouldn’t even leave me enough privacy to personalize so much as a notebook, the ability to customize a little space (even if I did a lousy job of it) was priceless.

Looking around now, however, everything seems to come pre-designed.  Blogs come with templates far more attractive and readable than my amateur themes; even the Google Sites service offers pre-structured pages whose layout can only be marginally customized.  Of the free web hosts – there are thousands out there – who allow you to upload your own custom HTML, they come with restrictions that I don’t really want to put up with.  Example: Free Web Space Inc has a 0.25MB limit on file size; but I want to be able to upload high-quality images.  And of course, there are ads – banners which do odd things to seamless 100%-height/width layouts of the sort I favour and which make frames impossible to use, which can only be removed by converting them to pop-ups.

I am, like the majority of users, inert.  I like to stay with my original service provider unless a new offer passes by that is tremendously better.  Or until the provider goes down.  So when I saw that Geocities was leaving for the mists of history, my first thought was to port my content here – to WordPress.  Then I thought of alternatives, and discovered the abovementioned restrictions of design and advertisement.

I guess I’ll be moving my content here after all.  Home sometimes isn’t where the HTML is – it can be where the words are.

Until en bloc happens, that is.