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by johnnyApplePRNG 1242 days ago
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.

4 comments

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

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

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.

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...

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

If I were your father, I would have been damn proud of you. I wouldn't have fronted you the cash either though.
I'm in a similar situation too. I had a website in 2000 hosted at cjb.net.
Try the archive.org CDX API, you might be able to find it.

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

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.