[johnnyApplePRNG]

I made my first website on geocities and it kills me that I cannot for the life of me find a record of it any longer.

It was a website that "sold" replica/counterfeit watches.

I was enthralled with them as a child for some reason. I knew they were popular items on the fledgling internet so I created a webpage for them on geocities and setup an email address to contact if you would like to purchase one.

I had lots of interested parties who wanted to buy the watches but unfortunately my parents would not front a 12 year old the cash required to purchase them in bulk from the shady internet supplier I had found. Probably a smart move on their part.

Fun times!

I ended up purchasing a few really high quality replicas when I visited China decades later as an adult.

I miss the early internet.

[pabs3]

Geocities was reasonably well archived, do you remember the URL?

https://archive.org/web/geocities.php

[darkwater]

I'm in a similar situation, I even remember more or less how it was visually but for the life of me I cannot remember the URL or what nickname I could have used, I cannot find it by my 16yo me nickname I remember :(

Edit: reading the page, it's a scrape from 2009. My page was from 1997-1998 and basically used only by me and my circle of friends, chances are it has been lost forever.

[pabs3]

archive.org geocities scrapes go back to 1996, so it is plausible it could have survived:

https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=geocities.com&mat...

If you ever remember any of the details, the CDX API can probably help.

https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/blob/master/wayba...

[dzhiurgis]

Iirc You can search web archive by string, not just url

[szszrk]

I was worried about same issue as well, although mostly in the area of website/knowledge screenshots as my desktop screenshots are pretty low in quantity.

Recently decided to selfhost Archivebox.io app. It feels a bit rough but delivers decent results. I love the PDFs and single file HTML dumps.

Managed to secure some very old sites I relied on for ages but never really saved them. All can be refreshed, dumped again, tagged, searched. UI is actually a Django admin page.

[mmcgaha]

If I were your father, I would have been damn proud of you. I wouldn't have fronted you the cash either though.

[myth2018]

I'm in a similar situation too. I had a website in 2000 hosted at cjb.net.

[pabs3]

Try the archive.org CDX API, you might be able to find it.

https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/blob/master/wayba...

[jkepler]

My first website, which I started in 1999, was first crawled by archive.org in 2005. I think that it was a few years late the computer science department decided to no longer allow alumni to have free home pages, and I lost access to the site.