My 2010 Geocities fan site vanished and I almost cried

I spent a good hour last night digging through Wayback Machine trying to find a fan site I ran in 2010 for an indie game that nobody remembers. The original page had this custom cursor effect and a MIDI file that looped some cheap synth track. I compared it to the only screenshot I saved on an old hard drive. The real site had way more charm than the cached version shows because the animated GIFs are all broken now. About 40 of us used to post in the guestbook and trade tips on hidden levels. That whole community just disappeared when Geocities shut down in 2009 but I thought my page lasted a few more years. If anyone has an old backup of a similar forgotten site, how do you even find those files now?

3 comments

3 Comments

pat36019d ago

casey943, you nailed it with "all those messages are gone for good." That gut punch feeling is real. In my situation with old hobby sites from the early 2000s, I started checking Archive.org every few months back when I realized how fast things disappear. I managed to grab a few guestbook pages before they vanished completely by right clicking and saving the whole page as HTML. It's not perfect but at least I have the text of what people wrote. Your best bet might be digging through old hard drives or asking on forums specifically for that game since someone might have saved a copy.

casey94319d ago

You still remember the guestbook? I had one on my old Neopets fan page in 2008 and it still hurts knowing all those messages are gone for good.

the_amy19d ago

Oh, I still have my old GeoCities guestbook memorized since I wrote most of those nice messages to myself pretending to have friends.