Homesteading the Web
From crispyneurons
A review of GeoCities' offer of free Web sites... by Jason Wells
October 1997
So you have an Internet account. You've visited tons of Web sites. Great -- but is looking at other people's content all there is to the Web?
Not at all. The Internet is all about interactivity, and that means user participation. This is not TV, and you need not be a passive recipient of the Internet experience. What many netizens of recent vintage don't realize is that you don't need special equipment or an engineering degree to publish a Web site on the Internet. In fact, you don't even need money. All you need is enterprise, a little moxie, and a Web service called GeoCities.
[edit] The Idea
GeoCities promotes a geographic metaphor. In their view, you are a potential "homesteader." You seek a place to publish Web pages. In this framework, the homesteader's home pages are organized into neighborhoods. Each neighborhood is tied to a specific theme. For example, my neighborhood, Athens/Acropolis, is officially "A community based on education, teaching, reading, writing and philosophy."
Personally, I had some trouble trying to tie the concept behind my site to a particular neighborhood -- none of the neighborhoods seemed to be a perfect fit due to the eclectic nature of the content I had in mind. This is where the GeoCities metaphor breaks down, but if your content deals with a popular, easily classified subject, GeoCities probably has a place for you. If not, don't fret: I've observed that many GeoCities pages have little or nothing to do with their neighborhood. I think this framework is more of a suggestion than an enforced reality.
In my case, Athens/Acropolis was close enough to what I needed. GeoCities is rapidly growing, and the list of neighborhoods and their themes is considerably longer than it was when I joined up only a few months ago.
[edit] Getting a Homestead
Once you have chosen an appropriate neighborhood, you must find a vacant address within that neighborhood. Each neighborhood has addresses ranging from 1000 to 9999. That's a lot of addresses to have to search through, and you'll probably find that most are already taken by other homesteaders. Surprisingly, GeoCities provides no list of vacant addresses for a given neighborhood. Instead, you have to use a crude search engine that can't even search an entire neighborhood in one pass.
As a result, I spent nearly half an hour trying to find a vacant address. There's no reason why this should have taken longer than two minutes.
Once you have selected a vacant address, you have to fill out a long form giving your name, address, e-mail address, and some other information. Another annoying problem can occur here: if you take too long to fill out the form, someone else may claim your neighborhood address before you do, and then you'll get an error indicating that you can't claim an address that's already claimed. This happened to me four times before I was lucky enough to fill out the form before someone else got the address.
Hopefully, GeoCities will make this process smoother in the future.
After you've staked a claim on a particular address in the neighborhood, you will get a user ID, a password, and 2MB of disk space to use on their Web server. This is all provided for free. GeoCities has a program, GeoCities Plus, that offers to expand your disk quota to 10MB for a fee. At first, I thought I would burn through the 2MB very quickly, and that I would need 10MB to do anything worthwhile. I was wrong. It's surprising how much you can do with 2MB, especially if you stick to compressed JPEG images.
Needless to say, I found the homestead registration for the service to be clumsy and frustrating. It was extremely difficult to use their rickety tools to claim an address.
Once I had successfully claimed an address, however, I had little trouble. Posting new pages, or editing existing pages, is easy. GeoCities includes several HTML editors that you can use to edit the page dynamically. To its credit, the GeoCities Web server hasn't been down once since I signed up. Every time I try to access my site, it's available.
[edit] Publishing Content
You can host any kind of content you want, as long as it conforms to GeoCities' Page Content Guidelines, which primarily prevent you from using the space for commercial or promotional purposes. You should read these guidelines before you attempt to homestead, so that you can be sure what you want to do is allowed. Since my site was basically a digital art project, this was no problem for me. They also insisted that I include a plug for their service in a prominent place.
Before you worry about what you can't publish, you might want to think about what you want to publish. In this respect, the sky's the limit. Be creative!
One of the great strengths of the Web is the depth of detail that can be offered. You could create the world's most thorough and comprehensive Welcome Back Kotter site.
Alternatively, many people like to use their homesteads to establish their digital identity -- their passions, their hatreds, and their hobbies. Some people use it as a free press for publishing their own stories or poems. Since it costs nothing, you have total freedom. Do what you want.
[edit] Creating and Posting Files
Creating and posting a Web page is not terribly hard. GeoCities provides several types of online editors you can use to create HTML documents.
This approach has the advantage that once you've edited the document, you don't have to upload it to the GeoCities Web server -- it's already there. Be aware, however, that all of GeoCities' HTML editors are pretty spartan, and none hide the HTML code completely. If you want, you can use a flashier stand-alone editor and then upload your finished pages to GeoCities.
GeoCities offers an FTP site that you can use to upload files to your space on the Web server. If you use Netscape v3.0 or greater, you can even upload files without using FTP. It can take a few minutes for the file you uploaded to become available to you -- it isn't quite instantaneous. Most people will probably have only HTML, JPEG, and/or GIF files, but you can put up just about anything.
As a test, I uploaded a small Java applet that I had written, and I found that it works just fine. I presume an ActiveX control would work as well. You can embed JavaScript into your HTML pages if you so choose. However, there is no way to run CGI scripts or anything that involves server-side execution. There doesn't appear to be support for Secure Sockets Layer or any other advanced encryption, but if you need this sort of thing, you probably shouldn't be using GeoCities anyway.
[edit] Learning HTML
If you want to learn more about the nuts and bolts of HTML and Web publishing, GeoCities offers a beginner's level HTML tutorial. There are also plenty of good Web sites that explain HTML. I would recommend visiting Que's Online Catalog. Many printed books are available on the subject as well.
[edit] Conclusions
Even with its blemishes, I've found using GeoCities to be a rewarding experience. Plus, you can't beat the price!
If you don't like GeoCities, there are several competitors: Tripod and Angelfire come to mind. Both of these companies offer free Web space to all comers.
Even if you don't own a computer or an ISP account, you can create a Web site from a friend's computer or at a public library. You will need to have an e-mail address, but since Hotmail gives them out for free, it's really no problem. If you want to experience the creative side of the Web, this makes for a no-barrier entry that anyone can try.
Jason Wells used to write articles like this just to get published in one of those crappy little local computer magazines that they give away for free at computer shops.
