After many years of operation, Yahoo has decided to close their Geocities site, putting thousands of website owners out of a free and comfortable home. I’ve had a geocities site for over ten years, probably more like 13 years. Back in the day when every Internet family had a web presence of some kind, geocities was a lot of fun. Depending on your interests, you could join a community and share your thoughts about those interests with the world. Many people used the free hosting as a launching ground for limited interest sites as well as some small businesses.

Well, it’s all gone now, dammit! I was lucky enough to have one of the more popular pages on geocities, depending on your search parameters, it was continually number one on google. Those days are gone, the Internet changes daily so we have to work out other solutions, right?

My geocities site was pretty small but I had different pages that I wanted to keep, to save for posterity. It had been a long time since I updated the pages and I had forgotten my passwords to the different ones I had. What to do? Well, as always, there is a solution to problems such as these and, as usual, I was able to find a free answer to my problems.

Instead of spending a lot of time saving each and every picture and web page, I downloaded a small bit of free software to help me. A search on google led me to HTTrack, which is available here: HTTrack. I had been thinking of Sitesucker but it’s not free and I love free!

After installing it, I directed HTTrack to my geocities site and in a matter of moments, my site was saved to my laptop for archiving later on. Quick, painless and oh so free. Loved it! Now I want to try it on other sites, just to see what happens if I try to download everything on a larger site. Might be fun!