This is nice. A while back, Yahoo pulled the plug on Geocities, the old web host famous for resembling a post-apocalyptic Levittown, with nicely categorized avenues and cul-de-sacs populated by mutated nasties like animated GIFs, scrolling marquees and centered, flashing text. We can scoff now.
People tried to rescue stuff before the switch was thrown. I rescued a site which let you read scripts from A Bit Of Fry & Laurie, which the original poster seemed OK with. Other people have done this as well, here and also here, the latter with video clips and extra goodies.
But now, it appears that a big project to rescue the entire Geocities world has released it as a torrent weighing in at 652 gigabytes. Perhaps the whole thing can be hosted somewhere. I hope so – I never had a Geocities page (I was an Angelfire kinda guy) but it is a piece of history, and to be able to preserve a huge chunk like that is great. It’s a like an archaeologist digging and finding an entire functioning society rather than just some shards of pottery.