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[Boiler]

The fact that GeoCities will be closing has been mentioned a number of times on the forum.

Has anyone come up with a good (free) alternative? 

Yahoo is offering an "bock copy" process for those wishing to upgrade to their pay service (I will not be taking advantage of this - I'm far too cheap).  Unfortunately, the process for backing up images locally is quite arduous.   Figure in the time to re-post on a different server and then search the forum in order to update links...you get the idea.  This is not a small effort.

The forum stands to loose a significant amount of information when this happens.  Linked information will simply go dead in many posts rendering them unintelligible.

Is there any effort underway to capture this information locally (somewhere on the forum servers)?   If not, we will loose information from both current and past members.

Here's the full email from Yahoo -

Important notice: GeoCities is closing.
Dear Yahoo! GeoCities customer,

We're writing to let you know that Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community, is closing on October 26, 2009.

On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files.

What You Need to Do
If you'd like to move your web site, or save the images and other files you've posted online, you need to act now by choosing one of the following options:

•   Move your site to Yahoo! Web Hosting.
We know your files are important to you, and we want to make moving to Web Hosting as easy and affordable as we can. For a limited time, you can move your files automatically, take advantage of terrific features like a personalized domain name and email, even redirect your GeoCities web address to your new site — all for only $4.99 a month for a full year.

For more information and complete terms, please see our special offer now.

•   Download your files to your own computer.
With your pages and images saved offline, you can re-create your site with any hosting provider.

To quickly download your published files, visit your GeoCities web site, right-click on each page, and choose Save Page As... from the menu that appears. Choose a location on your computer to save your files, then click OK or Save. Learn more about downloading your files.

Don't Wait
Please be aware that after October 26, your GeoCities files will be deleted from our servers, and will not be recoverable. If you'd like to save your files, you must download them now or move to Yahoo! Web Hosting. If you need assistance, please visit the help center.

We want to thank you for being a GeoCities customer, and hope you continue to enjoy our other Yahoo! services.

Best regards,

The Yahoo! GeoCities team

[Brian H]

  Another free site going down.

I believe a few of the X10 supporters on the ATT storage site where also lost.

Not good but at least you got some warnings. I read of some smaller photo storage sites just closing one day and all the stored photos where gone for ever. No warnings where given or a one day one where the servers overloaded big time with users desperately trying to retrieve their photos.

[HA Dave]

..Has anyone come up with a good (free) alternative? 

No. I own my own last name domain... and have since the "early days". And have used Geocities, http://www.tripod.lycos.com/, and AOL. I now have RoadRunner... and I think they offer free space also.

I've stopped posting my BVC Fan Site Link.... until I decide what to do.

[HA Dave]

Even though there are still some free Sites out there... I decided to rent my own space. I now have my BVC Fan Site at my new Domain:

[-Bill- (of wgjohns.com)]

Wow!

By my count, (doing a simple search), there are about 450 posts here that reference geocities!

Not sure what can be done about it, as the referenced material is technically the property of the geocities account owners.

I'm not sure what legal trouble would be stirred up by trying to back it up somewhere?   

What a mess!   

[HA Dave]

....  there are about 450 posts here that reference geocities! Not sure what can be done about it..

I feel awful about it myself as I never hesitated to post a link or an image that was hosted by Geocities. I have already began replacing or REMOVING these links (by modifying the old posts).... as well as posting my notice here. I know of no perminate solution for any of this. Nothing... not even this forum or X10 itself is forever.

Back when I worked for the government... archiving important as-well-as routine documents and pictures had become a concern. Although people tend to create large amounts of digital files now. Ownership, preservation, and backups are often overlooked issues. What we (as a people) are creating is what archaeologists are already calling a "digital black hole". A space in time where huge amounts of records seemingly.. disappear. Just think about what future conspiracy theorists will make of this!

[HA Dave]

AND.... just in the nick (whoever Nick is) of time... offers come in offering to move geocities accounts for free. Worth checking out.

http://geocities-closing.com/

[Oldtimer]

Wow.  I feel like I'm back in college again.  I've known about Geocities closing for over two months and I still put off moving my stuff and converting my links until the last minute, but, now that it's done for the Monday deadline, I can party the rest of the weekend.   

For any of you that haven't tackled this yet, the most important thing is to be sure you have copies of all your Geocities files on your computer before Monday night.  That's when the coach turns back into a pumpkin.

As to the conversion itself it turned out to be fairly straight forward, except for one glitch, once I figured out a system to do it quickly. 

The glitch?  I wasn't consistent when I named several picture files for uploading to Geocities.  I used a "JPG" suffix instead of a "jpg" suffix.  When I FTPd these files to their new location the program cleaned them up and made them lower case the way they were supposed to be.  When the new links didn't work it took me over an hour to figure out what was going on. 

By the way it's easy using the Forum Search and the geocities/username root to find all the links you need to replace.

Here's the system I used to convert 38 links used multiple times in 20 posts spread across 12 threads.  To start I created a sub-directory on the my site named X10 for all the Forum stuff:

• Open a copy of Notepad.
• Preload a REPLACE as follows
     SEARCH:  geocities.com/x10-oldtimer@sbcglobal.net
     REPLACE: sfpasc.com/x10
  Of course it should be customized for you.
• Click MODIFY on the post you want to fix.
• CUT it out of the Forum editing window.
• Go into the Notepad window
• Right click SELECT ALL then DELETE any existing text.
• Right click PASTE what you copied from the Forum into Notepad
• REPLACE (Search and Replace) until every thing is corrected.
• Right click SELECT ALL
• Right Click COPY
• Right click PASTE what you copied from Notepad into the Forum editing window
• PREVIEW and check the new links.
• SAVE
  
  

That's all there is to it.

There are still two posts that reference my files that I haven't been able to convert, because they were done by someone else.  Hopefully one of the Administrators can make those conversions.

[HA Dave]

There are still two posts that reference my files that I haven't been able to convert, because they were done by someone else.  Hopefully one of the Administrators can make those conversions.

Done.

[Boiler]

Dave and Oldtimer,

Once again you saved my bacon.  Moving things from Geocities to Ucoz was fairly painless.  Using Oldtimers method of replacing the links on the forum proved to be efficient and painless as well.  I'm not as organized as Oldtimer, so I didn't keep track of the number of links.  I would quantify them as "a lot".

I have one thread remaining that I can't edit (locked):    
Soft-Start Dimmer Problems -PLEASE READ FIRST

If one of the Admin's could kindly unlock the thread, I can re-link to the Ucoz site.

Thank you gents,
Boiler

[Brian H]

Boiler. It is unlocked.

[Boiler]

Brian,

Thank you - updates completed

[HA Dave]

It may be that the most popular (most seen) Web Page at Yahoo. That is... the one below [attached]. But what caught my attention is the tiny little notice at the bottom (right). The WayBack Machine [project]. Over 150 billion web pages archived since 1996. If you've lost your Geocities images... it still may not be too late.

[Oldtimer]

I thought I'd gotten all my stuff updated before the Geocities deadline, but thanks to a heads up from Mellowmark I learned that I'd never converted any of the links inside my X10 home page, even though the link from my profile to that page was correct.   

They're all fixed now.