My old GeoCities site got a visit counter that broke at 10,001 hits

I was in my college dorm room in 1998, and I'd just added one of those free hit counters to my fan page for the band Garbage. It worked fine until it rolled over to 10,001, and then the whole page just showed a broken image icon. I had to dig into the HTML (which I barely knew) and find the line for the counter script to delete it. The page loaded fine after that, but I was bummed to lose the count. Anyone else have a 90s web widget totally crash their page?

2 comments

2 Comments

young.emma1mo agoMost Upvoted

My friend's Angelfire page had a scrolling marquee text bar that just would not stop. It was supposed to say "Welcome to my cool zone" but it scrolled so fast it was just a blur, and it made the whole site load super slow. We spent an entire Saturday trying to find the right tag to kill it. The internet was a wild place back then.

susan_nguyen1mo ago

Oh man, that takes me back. I once tried to make a marquee go in a figure-eight pattern by nesting the tags, and it just crashed my browser completely. Had to ask my dad to restart the computer, and he was so mad because it messed up his solitaire game. I never did figure out the right code, just accepted my page was doomed to have a frantic, blurry greeting.