http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10226255-2.html
“Yahoo is closing its GeoCities personal home page service, and with it will go an era of self-expression on the Web that’s largely been replaced by social networks and blogs.”
Wow, and I only cancelled mine a couple months ago!
I had first gotten a Geocities account in college, when I wanted to put up some random applets, which are now found on the programming tab of my site. I also uploaded my resume.
All in all, it wasn’t a great site. It also wasn’t designed nearly so grotesquely as most of the others.
I remember Geocities as it says in that article: It was a backwater. Any time I was Googling something and found myself on a Geocities page, I considered just pressing the back button before reading anything. After all, what good could come of such information?
At any rate, it’s an ambivalent moment: One more old piece of the web, hailing back from the darkest ages, is fading away; but it was a wonderful piece of history. At the very least, historians must write about it.
What other monstrosities from the past are haunting us? Besides IE6.
On another note, I may have mentioned how slow this blog is.
I’m using a mobile internet connection, which has an impressive bandwidth of about 7.2Mbps (which actually works out to a still-reasonable 6.2Mbps), about 80KB/s throughput (If I get the full 800KB/s, it’s because I’m downloading ten things at once), and a rather slow latency.
In fact, WordPress seems to load thirty-three (!) different scripts, which altogether takes about a minute. After that, it has the forty-four images, which is another minute. Somewhere during the images, though, I can at least start writing.
I’d read from certain places (Dave Shea at messoblue had posted on this topic not too long ago) about CSS sprites, where every image is collated into one big file, which is used with hidden overflows and positioning to get the proper image showing out of it. The end result is something a bit smaller, but that one image only needs one server request. I’m sure anyone with a satellite uplink appreciates it when someone uses an sprite sheet.
In my case, I’m sure it would shave off a whole minute of waiting, for every single page. I imagine the browser needs to communicate with the server before it can decide to use its cached version?
Another thing I want to know is if I can condense the JS files into just a few. They look to be modular so that I can switch them with custom versions, or update them easier. As it is, I might go without certain features of extensibility, if it means I don’t have to wait a minute or more before writing.
I think my server is partly at fault. It loads in a quarter the time on localhost. (That’s a bit sarcastic; I’d expect localhost to be near-instant, as it’s located directly on my machine.)
(Oh, there are eleven different CSS files, too.)