User:Jimhabegger

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No questions about the archive please

Please, only write to me if you are volunteering to help, or if you have information about the contents or new location of a homestead. If you send me questions about the archive, they will be ignored. I don't know any more than what you can find in this wiki.

About Jim

I was born in Indiana and I've also lived in Illinois, Florida, Virginia, Martinique and China. My wife and I are now living with our son's family in Shanghai. Our daughter's family is in Quebec. My wife is teaching in a nursery school and I'm checking the English on some environmental research papers.

Most of my time on the Internet has been trying to practice and promote my ideas for community service and development. I started at GeoCities, then later I participated in some forums and groups related to my interests in God-centered living, improving myself to help improve the world, immersing myself in other cultures, and walking and working with abused and marginalized people. In every discussion I was trying to practice and promote my ideas for community service and development. Now I'd like to spend more time reading blogs, trying to learn how to encourage and support people in the good that I see them doing.

Offline, I've worked in precision mold design and manufacturing, computer programming, landscaping, economic and social research, environmental research, and youth outreach.

I've spent a lot of time, off and on, trying to use free software systems, including GNU/Linux, BSD and Plan9.

My interest in the GeoCities heritage

My online community life, my Web pages and my blogging started at GeoCities. I had five accounts there. I backed them up and started looking for somewhere else to put them some day, if I ever want to. That was the end of it for me for a while. Then a few weeks ago I had one of my periodic attacks of missing people and places of long ago, including GeoCities in the time of the neighborhoods and community leaders. I found out about the archive projects while I was investigating possible ways for the GeoCities heritage to live on.

Some things I'd like to see (Help wanted)

Anyone who would like to help with any of these projects, please email me at geotalk@yahoo.com.

There are some things I'd like to see happen for the GeoCities heritage that I won't be able to do myself, but I can help.

- Archiving pages that link to GeoCities homesteads, before those disappear too. They might have information about homesteads that were not saved by any archiving projects.

- Asking former community leaders for help.

- Web pages about the GeoCities heritage, explaining its historical and cultural significance and what it means to some people.

- Web pages with stories from community leaders and other homesteaders about their life at GeoCities, and where they are now.

- Some kind of reconstruction or representation of the flavor, character and spirit of life at GeoCities in the time of the neighborhoods and community leaders.

- Indexes and directories of the archives.

- Indexes and directories of surviving fragments of GeoCities homesteads, friendships, neighborhoods and community life.

- Indexes and directories of information about GeoCities. One example is Blade's list of the neighborhoods and suburbs.

- Homesteader and community leader reunions.

- Finding widely read bloggers to help publicize GeoCities heritage projects and help needed.

I'll try to provide examples of those ideas. I've downloaded a few pages that link to GeoCities pages, and tracked down one former homesteader. I Googled "EnchantedForest/Tower/" to find pages that link to homesteads in that suburb. I followed some leads I found there to learn more about what was on one of the homesteader's pages, and what she's doing now. I emailed her to find out if she still has a backup of her GeoCities pages, or if she has similar pages somewhere else, or if she would agree to be included on some Web pages about where former homesteaders are now.

If anyone can help me automate finding and downloading pages that link to GeoCities homesteads, please let me know.

Does anyone have any ideas how to get the word out for people to back up their pages that link to GeoCities homesteads, before they remove or update the links?

I'm also planning to write to some community leaders to ask them to help with all this.

Archiving Web pages that link to GeoCities homesteads

I've downloaded a few Weg pages that link to GeoCities homesteads. With my current method I can download about four per minute. My searches for two suburbs have turned up about four hundred pages for each one. I haven't done the math, but it looks like there might be several hundred suburbs. Maybe a thousand hours or more. With the one or two hours per week I can spend on it, that would take five hundred weeks at least, ten years. Meanwhile those links might be disappearing fast. I need maybe fifty people to help, or a way of doing it that's fifty times as fast, or some combination of the two.

That's the most urgent part. After that those pages will need to be studied, and followed wherever they lead, to get information about lost homesteads and about the homesteaders, for various heritage projects.

The watermark

I see the watermark as a significant landmark in the history of GeoCities. Altericon's version

Not gone!

All-Wright Site

Jennifer's Stonehedge Farms

Oops! I forgot about GeoCities Plus.