One of my first exposures to the web was geocities and I recall creating a site on GeoCities under the “Cape Canaveral” space. And I only remembered that when I stumbled across OoCities.org and saw the name. Being a kid I was really into space and astronomy and created my GeoCities within that space. I keep trying to find my page but am constantly disappointed when every attempt ends in failure - although you do run into some amazing sites from the early years of the web.

It’s amazing how our memories work. I barely remember anything about my site other than that I had an animated gif genie on the homepage, an off-yellow-orange background, and the fact that I took full advantage of frames (not iframes) and framesets. I have no idea what i wrote about or any of the text which makes existing search tools nearly useless. And so I go on getting a bout of nostalgia every couple of days that gives me the motivation to keep exploring the ancient corners of the web.

I’m not quite there yet but I suspect the last step will be just downloading the full 652 GB archive and attempting a bunch of different shell commands and scripts to try to find my site. I would have already done this if I were able to download the archive but unfortunately just don’t have the space. In this case using AWS to spin up an instance just to download and extract the Cape Canaveral data might be worth it.