geocitiesclosing



	This is a GeoCities site. GeoCities is owned by Yahoo! A couple of months ago, the following announcement appeared on the opening GeoCities page. (You can skip down to the bottom of this page to see that the situation probably won't present the big problem that the first announcement indicated.) Important Announcement After careful consideration, Yahoo! has decided to close GeoCities later this year. You can continue enjoying your GeoCities service until then, and when we close, we'll make it easy for you to transition to Yahoo! Web Hosting. You don't need to change a thing right now — we just wanted to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We'll share more details this summer. For now, please visit the help center for more information. Well, okay, they're going to make it easy. Sounds good. Then it occurred to me that I've done hundreds of pages with thousands of internal links. All of these links include "geocities" as part of the URL. Will they work when there is no GeoCities? I put that question on the GeoCities message boards and received the following reply: No. Links to geocities won't work when geocities does not exist. Also, I think you will find that editing Pagebuilder pages when there is no Pagebuilder is more than just a little difficult. Which was probably the point of fooling people into using Pagebuilder in the first place, so they should not move. Yes, it IS sort of possible to edit them in Notepad or whatever. Just editing existing text slightly won't be hard. But when it comes to changing layout features, or adding more text than there is room for, you will be in trouble. Long term, learning from scratch how to make normal pages will be far easier. And later the same person added: I've been thinking some more about your site. There is a program called EditPad (google it). This makes it possible, after you download your pages, to open ALL of the pages in EditPad (or a couple of hundred at a time, looks as if you have a lot of pages), and do a search and replace routine. Check the box for "in all open documents", and replace http://www.oocities.org/daninhopedale/ with nothing. Then there is a button to save all open documents. In a short time, you should be able to edit all the links. Next, download a file called http://www.oocities.org/clipart/pbi/c.g... upload to new site and replace http://www.oocities.org/clipart/pbi/ with nothing. When you have done this, you can start learning html, and replace your pages one by one as they develop a need for editing. And no, html is NOT complicated. On the contrary. The code for a typical page on your site (one column of text and an image) is so much simpler than Pagebuilder code that you will find it hard to believe. If you look at the source code of your pages, Pagebuilder creates a table, and filles the first row with variations of this invisible image in various widths to organize the layout of your page.I FTPed my site to my own computer to save a copy. Then I got a new Yahoo account (with my own URL) and put it back up on that site (again using an FTP program - filezilla) while keeping my GeoCities account active. This time I've got my own domain name on the Yahoo account so I will never lose the URL I have for my site again. But keeping the Geocities account open until they shut it down allows me to put a notice on it that the site will be going down and pointing to the new site. Another person on the GeoCities message boards sent this: I FTPed my site to my own computer to save a copy. Then I got a new Yahoo account (with my own URL) and put it back up on that site (again using an FTP program - filezilla) while keeping my GeoCities account active. This time I've got my own domain name on the Yahoo account so I will never lose the URL I have for my site again. But keeping the Geocities account open until they shut it down allows me to put a notice on it that the site will be going down and pointing to the new site. If you liked the GeoCities interface, the Yahoo one seems to be the same. I had a lot of links pointing to my old site from other people's websites, so I contacted some of those people to let them know about the new web address for my site. You might try this if as you say you think it is worth something to keep the Geocities site. Hosting the same site on Yahoo seems about the same with some upgrades possible. It was a lot of work, but part of that was changing the URLs to relative URLs which I should have had all along. So it sounds as though I can take care of this. It just might take a year or two. Does anyone have any other ideas? Any optimists who can tell me that Yahoo can set it up so URLs containing "geocities" will still work? Any easier ways to solve the problem if they don't? Email me. After several months of going through the sort of thing you see above, Yahoo/GeoCities finally came out with the far less alarming announcement: GeoCities is closing, but your site will not change. We're closing GeoCities on October 26, 2009, but as a valued GeoCities Plus customer, you won't experience any change to your site. After we close, you can upgrade your GeoCities Plus account to Yahoo! Web Hosting at no extra charge for five years. When you move to Web Hosting, you'll gain some great features, including a personalized domain name (like widgetdesigns.com), matching email, our easiest-to-use site building tool, 24-hour phone support, and more. After October 26, when you sign in to your GeoCities Control Panel, we'll ask you to choose a domain name. Then you'll sign in to your new Web Hosting Control Panel much like you signed in here today. You don't need to do anything to prepare. HOME