Despite having so many sites and being hosted in so many places, I still have fond memories for two places I used to frequent, back in the day: Geocities and iVillage. They were similar in that they both had strong communities, well policed by users, and were actually fun to be a part of, never mind making websites and all of that.

I remember the fun of looking for a "neighbourhood" for my first Geocities site. I decided to go with the women's neighbourhood, Wellesley. The next thing was to find a "house". There was actually a map, with vacant slots as houses. All you had to do was pick one, click on it and fill in the form that it led to. It was fun seeing who was "living" next to one's site. My first site was http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/3770/. My site went through a few looks, and titles. At one point it was "The Lighthouse Keeper", "Peroriaeth" and then "White Bird". It contained pieces on women in history, Paganism, cats, my favourite poetry and webrings. There were pages on my other Geocities sites, my sister and I, living in New Zealand, my family and links to my favourite sites. To be honest, I was none too keen on the Wellesley neighbourhood guides as they were a trifle, "stuffy", shall we say. Better were the Paris guides and I became one of them, for a while. I also had sites in SouthBeach, Athens, SiliconValley, Vienna, Petsburgh, Soho, TelevisionCity, CollegePark and Bourbon Street as well. But Geocities decided to get rid of the cosy neighbourhoods, to shrink our urls to our usernames and to get rid of everything that made it a different, fun place to be. I still miss the old days, even with the long urls.

iVillage gave away free websites to its members for a while. They were based on the old Angelfire model, which was also used by other niche community sites. Better yet, the websites board was a lively, fun place to be. The community leaders thought up competitions, challenges and themes for us to explore in our sites. I remember writing a silly piece about the iVillage winter olympics. Then everything changed. A familiar story. sigh The website board was so well hidden that it was almost impossible to find from the board index. And though the board was billed as being about websites and graphics, it was all about making huge sigtags and swapping them. After a while, iVillage took away their old style sites and everyone had to move to Tripod, which personally I could not stand, thanks to its vast number of adverts and popups (which also affected Angelfire too). I started to move away then, getting my own domain and finding out about hosting and so on. One could say that it was time I did move, but I missed the old comradery of everyone sharing the pages they had made, back when personal websites were not all about blogs, blogs and nothing but blogs.

The answer seemed to be in free webspace forums, where you could get free webspace, often with no adverts, for posting in a forum. The problem there is, while they were rather nice, the members tended to be teenagers and it felt a little odd to be posting among them, knowing that I was old enough to be their collective mother. But I did miss the sense of community from the old days. The internet as a whole seems to have lost a lot of that old friendliness and well, community spirit now that everyone has decamped to boring social media. Or perhaps I am just getting old!