Last night, whilst surfing the Internet, we decided to randomly type in the name of the very first site we built, Staj’s Star Trek Voyager Site. We knew this site didn’t exist anymore because it was hosted on Yahoo! GeoCities and this free webhosting service no longer exists (it was shut down two years ago after being not very profitable for its owners). Still, we wanted to see what results would come up. Fifteen pages of search results showed up on the Google search. We scrolled down the results and clicked into a few sites that had linked to our site, then followed the links to our own fansite.
“Sorry, the GeoCities web site you were trying to reach is no longer available” is the message we get.
Looking at this, it was kind of sad. Our fansite, which we devoted so much of our time on during our younger days, no longer exists. Over three hundred pages, fifteen or so sections with many more sub-sections and sub-sub-sections, disappeared within a day. We did back it up onto our hard-drive and we could always relaunch it on this domain of ours (we might someday), but it just wasn’t the same. We had hoped that our Star Trek Voyager fansite would live on the Internet forever on its original webhost.
We went through some more pages of search results to find oocities.org. Apparently this site saves and archives pages that were “unique scientific sources or are of great public interest”, “historically interesting”, or “representing the 90’s website culture and style”. Browsing through the paths, we find out that our fansite was one of them saved. We’re not sure which of the three categories we fit into, but we were happy to see that someone went to the trouble of saving some of these GeoCities sites and relaunched them on another webhost in the same structure as GeoCities. We excitedly click on the link to our fansite and see the sky-blue background featuring an overlay of the Voyager crew and Starship Voyager load. They really saved it, we thought. We then click each of the sections to find them missing. They had only managed to grab the first page. What a disappointment.
It was not until we scanned through the last few pages of the search results on Google, we came across reocities.com, a place that saved our entire site as well as hundreds of thousands of other GeoCities accounts! All the Geocities Neighbourhoods were saved. Millions of pages archived. Our fansite and all its sections, pages, pictures, sounds, were all saved. Our fansite lives on! What’s more, during this search, we found out that our site is part of this Fan History Wiki. We’re not sure what this is, but it’s nice to be included.
So for those of you who love Star Trek Voyager and are looking for Staj’s Star Trek Voyager Site, go visit our site at http://www.reocities.com/Area51/Starship/9943! It still exists. For those of you who built a site on GeoCities and wish to visit your own site, visit reocities.com. They saved a lot of accounts back in 2009. Chances are, yours is there. If it isn’t, you could see if they’re still accepting files for inclusions. You could also try visiting oocities.org: ours may not have been saved in full, but there were a lot of accounts that were.
Update 9 Sept 2017: We just discovered another place where our Star Trek Voyager site lives on. Thanks to one of our visitors to our blog (thank you, Warren!), we’ve been advised our Staj’s Star Trek Voyager Site can be found on web.archive.org as well. This site looks to have saved most of our site, too!
Live Long and Proper!
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