Today marks the end of Geocities, perhaps the most popular service early on in the days of the World Wide Web to allow the masses to make their presence known on the Internet. And that presence was largely made through the heavy use of automatically-playing background midi music, epileptic seizure-inducing animated gifs and the liberal use of Comic Sans. The spirit of Geocities will never die, though, and not just because tripod.com still exists, as the whole thing has pretty much been transplanted into myspace.com.
Meanwhile, with pre-made templates and tighter control on design elements, personal blogs like WordPress and social networking sites like Facebook have largely reined in the more gaudy elements of those manyfold Geocities sites. In a way it makes me a little sad, in the same way that one witnesses the loss of innocence when a child stops believing in Santa. In another way is makes me glad because many of those sites provided compelling evidence that the average net-user had the taste and design chops of a moss-covered rock.