If you didn’t already know, I’ve been trying to help Jason Scott at http://archiveteam.org to back up Yahoo’s 18-year-old free hosting service http://geocities.com before they take it down for good later this summer ( http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/geocities-05.html ). Well, everything was going well until I got capped by Comcast ( http://badcheese.com/?q=node/94 ) at 250GB of bandwidth in May 2009. So, my effort was put on hold. Jason and the rest of the gang at http://archiveteam.org has methodically run through all of the ‘neighborhoods’ at GeoCities already and downloaded nearly 1TB of content. There is still a lot of information in the user’s directories that Jason has not downloaded yet.

Since I was using the http://archive.org crawler (Heritrix) to crawl GeoCities, I was asking a lot of questions in the forums and it turns out that the guys at archive.org were actually paying attention to my problems. So when Comcast cut me off, the guys at http://archive.org decided to help us out and do a “deep crawl” of GeoCities which started in early June. They also said that they’ll do “catch up” crawls until the service closes to make sure they get any recent updates up until the day that Yahoo closes their doors.

So, thanks to Jason @ http://archiveteam.org and Gordon Mohr @ http://archive.org, GeoCities and all of it’s animated gif goodness will remain on the internet until the end of time. Yea!

NOTE: We tried contacting people at Yahoo and most tape and harddrive storage companies to help us with the project and nobody even bothered to return our phone calls or emails except for the guys at http://archive.org

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