TIL my old Geocities guestbook has over 500 signatures

I was looking at an old backup CD and found the HTML file for my 'Under Construction' fan site from 1998. I opened it in a browser and scrolled to the guestbook, and the counter said 512 entries, which is way more than I ever remembered getting. Has anyone else been surprised by how many people actually visited their old personal sites back then?

3 comments

3 Comments

anthonygarcia2mo ago

My old Tripod site for my terrible poetry had a hit counter stuck at 99 for years. I finally checked the raw logs a decade later and found it had actually stopped counting after 10,000 visits. I was apparently the unwitting muse for a whole lot of very patient, or very lost, people on the early internet. It's a special kind of humble to realize your angsty teen ramblings were someone else's weird background noise.

butler.shane1mo ago

Found my old site stats and it was the opposite. Had this huge counter but the logs showed maybe 20 real people. Rest were just web crawlers. Felt pretty lame actually.

evanpalmer2mo ago

Totally thought my old Angelfire page got maybe 50 hits max. Found the log file a few years back and it had thousands of page views. The web was smaller then, so people just clicked on anything. Makes you realize how many bored folks were just surfing random sites.