Saturday, April 25, 2009

Sigh another app at Yahoo being closed down.

Changes, changes changes. Yahoo is making more. I learned of this latest change they are going to do from a blog I follow Eye of Polyphemus. Yahoo is closing down their free website hosting "Geocities". They have just made the announcement so far, and say that the shut down will happen around the summer. Details on how to save current accounts will be given a little later. They will no longer have a free service you will have to pay $4.95/month for their Yahoo domain service. At least it looks like you can choose your own domain name.

Back in 1997 when I first set up my free account with Geocities the choices of free website hosting was limited to about 3 or 4 services, and the webhosting services that you had to pay for had prices that were skyhigh. Also at the time when you set up your Geocities website you chose a neighborhood to move into there were neighborhood categories like "Hollywood" for entertainment related sites, "Soho" for arts related sights yadda yadda. For my sight I chose the Athens/Olympus area because I wanted mysite to be mostly original poems and writings I wrote, well I branched out in to other areas. Shortly there after Yahoo bought Geocities and the website urls were renamed from the long neighborhood addresses to simply "geocities.com/youraccountname". For extra $$ you can get your own domain name and that eliminates the ads that appear on your site.

Oh getting back to my main part of this rant. Earlier this year Yahoo shut down it's Breifcase function, which was primarily another storage area for all sorts of files. It was primarily designed to shuttle files from your home computer to work or vice versa. At least that they gave some warning about. About a year or two ago they got rid of their Yahoo Photos service, which was like photobucket, or flickr without any warning (at least without any warning I remember). Unfortunately for me I didn't know about the photo shut down and lost who knows how many photos. I think anything of any real importance I still have elsewhere, but since I didn't have anytime to make preparations I don't know if I lost anything that was just over there. Sigh. With the briefcase, which I used a little bit but not too much, I was able to save whatever was there that I wanted. Hopefully with Geocities I will be able to save what I want. Right now there are some photos there that are only there that I know of so I'll have to do some saving. Most of my regular pages over there I have updated/duplicated at my own website klandersen.com.

Gee thanks Yahoo.

No comments: