I’m packing my files from Geocities, and my eyes are feeling a bit watery.

No, I’m not crying… My eyes hurt from staring at the monitor too long without blinking that much… Who would have thought that a few megabytes can be a lot of files? Saving them one at a time is troublesome…

Yeah, I just learned that Geocities – a free web hosting site from Yahoo, will be retiring this year… Seems that times really do change, eh?

I have been using that site for more than six years already, to host my personal website which I just use as a portfolio site. I have seen my site grow and evolve over the years – from one which can cause epileptic spasms due to the animated images, to something which my friends say is more professional-looking.

It started when I was sixteen or seventeen. Back then, having your own developed site was an awesome thing. My friends started making their own, and I observed them. I was fascinated by what they did. I did not have my own computer then, so I had to either use the laboratory, or the one my cousin had.

Each of us would share our designs. We did not have much fancy web-design tools, too. We had notepad to manually code HTML. Images were courtesy of the internet, grabbed from other sites, or a little tweaks care of paint. While most of my friends had the help of Paint Shop Pro, making their site a little advanced, I was still in the dark. I remember that my first design was a complete imitation of one of my friend’s site. I had to learn from something, you know?

We used Angelfire back then. Something about the name sounding cool or whatnot… But when ads started ruining my design, I went to Geocities.

Yeah, Ads – the price you pay for the free service. I am at least fine with the way Geocities’ ads were placed at the side, and can be closed or hidden by the viewer. That way, the design of the site won’t be ruined.

When I finally obtained my first PC, my website finally went through. I had no image editor yet, though, so it still wasn’t much. It was just some simple design with the help of well-placed tables, and some scripts that one can find in the web. There were also less animated images.

A PC upgrade and a few years later, along with lots of trashed designs, the site was looking alright. I was involved in some writing for a company’s website, and there I was introduced to Photoshop and Dreamweaver. A few months after the project was finished, they contacted me again. It was about another freelance web design project. This time, I was also involved in the site development and design – not just writing. In fact, they had me study PHP and SQL. They said it had something to do with my coding skills. I was actually surprised, for the coding skills I had was organizing stuff in HTML and editing Java Scripts. I learned a lot from that project, which I also applied to my site. Version 3.0 was born. I also was able to create a website for our art club – both were, of course, hosted by Geocities.

When I graduated college, I was involved in being a writer and graphic artist for our yearbook. The fun stuff about being with other artists is that you tend to pick up tricks and skills from them. Before, all I knew was layering two or more pictures and blending them well with some masking… Let’s just say that the one month’s work introduced me to some other tools available…

I knew that my free time would be occupied by my review for the board exams, so I decided to give my site a more professional look and content. I transformed it to my portfolio and finalized the site structure. I practically left it alone for a couple more years, just some minor updates here and there.

Well, that’s how my little site evolved…

Of course, as time went by, less and less visitors came. Mostly one or two of my friends would drop by and leave me a message in a month. I was not that bothered. It was, after all, just a personal site, and a means for them to get in touch with me and see some of my works, rather than a hard-core, revenue generating site, or something that targets a broader audience.

Most of my on-line stuff was in TheO anyway…

I have associated Geocities with my first step into web development. And as it comes to a close, I feel the necessity to give it at least a good look-back and farewell. It was a long journey, and I guess it’s time to put that storage shack to retirement. People are more into ready-made blogs and network things now, rather than build their own stand-alone pages where you exchange links with friends. I guess the age for static, self-based sites is coming to a close…

However, I’m not going to retire my little personal site on the net. I’ll probably find a new place to make its home and give it another different look. For now, I’ll continue packing my stuff and wait for this building-on-the-net, that housed a lot of residents and gave others like me a chance to publish their works – both serious and silly, and share it to the world, to be demolished…