If you wish to get a brief, yet funky, history of the internet, click here.

If the lost cities of geo intrigued you, and you have a few minutes to spare, click here.

If you’re still here, you should also check out this little brother of Geocities here - I highly recommend an adblocker for an undisturbed experience.

( If, when reading this text, you get bored at any point, feel free to skip to the fun stuff at the very end!!)

And here, screenshots are automatically generated from a stash of old Geocities home pages. For the next six years, this page will upload seventy two geocities pages per day. They were rescued by the Archive Team in 2009.

That blog is runned by Dragan Espenschied and net-artist and historian, Olia Lialina. Click here for her portfolio.

Olia Lialina writes about all sorts of internet things: for more information on the (irl) culture during the early internet, click here.

You will also come across some nostalgic pictures of internet cafes, like the ones here.

Olia also demonstrated the history of gifs with this example here. And here are some publications of hers. I’m a big fan, as you can tell.

The Archive Team, of which Olia is an ally too, is “a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage.” -here.

I have to admit, their site can be a little hard to navigate, but this here is a nice lecture by their media representative.

If both the website and the lecture leave you a little unstimulated, this under-construction sign collection here might help.

For a more in-depth read on the history of deliberate destruction of knowledge, click here.

This book here is a good read too, especially if you enjoyed that nice text you read earlier ;)

This is the fun part!! If you are ready for your next step, I would like to introduce you to some hand-coding. This 3 minute video here is a fun and easy introduction to the coding languages of the internet. It’s as simple as a builder, an artist and a wizard! You can learn to become an internet-builder here, with some basic html. And last but not least: this here is where you write your code. It’s a simple tutorial by a female web developer, which can be hard to find.

Oh yes and you also need to find a domain to eventually share your site with the world! I like this one here because it’s free and it sounds like Geocities, and kind of is like Geocities, but new.

You won’t believe how fast I wrote this text! It’s my writing-emails-in-2012-as-a-twelve-year-old, mindset I think.

Louise(-huyghe@outlook.com)