[oceanic]

I wish I could upvote this comment more than once.

I remember getting on Geocities in 1996 and finding a burgeoning community, full of randomness and fun, all learning as we went along about how build websites. I remember mine was in the “Bourbon Street” “neighbourhood”.

I had a lot of fun that year, messing about on IRC, learning HTML, building (ugly :-) websites, helping others do the same. Can't believe I sound nostalgic about that place.

I think I'll set up my daughter (nearly 9, already has her own domain) with a GitHub account, and set up Pages so she can play with HTML, CSS and stuff.

[nvr219]

Same here. I remember in '97 my grandma bought me a Geocities "plus" (or whatever it was called) account so I could have a geocities.com/~username vanity address. All my real life nerd friends were so jealous of me. :-)

Having free home pages on Geocities did a lot for my career. What will my son gain from whatever "social" web site is around when he starts using a computer (and yeah he also already has his own domain name)?

[rudasn]

ha! That's exactly how I started a bit more than 10 years ago. IRC, geocities, and a bunch of ugly websites.

My father always used to say "Leave the computer alone and do your homework. No one will pay you for 'playing' on the computer".

5 years later he was my first paying client. Nowadays people only pay me when I "play with my computer".