The End of Geocities

Not so much new news but as of recently, Yahoo, as part of their crazy restructuring will drop the free web hosting service, Geocities. Back in December till around March of 2002, I first posted this site on Geocities so I can thank my very start to the service. The offical release of Chuck's Anime Shrine then happened in March when I payed for service on ocatch.com, then migrated to Netfirms.com an then finally to globat.com. Yep, I still use a web hosting service for the site after all this time. Granted, yes I should soon migrate to running my own servers as the traffic becomes higher and higher but..I'll leave that to the future.

Anyways, Geocities and sites like xanga.com were home to the first anime fan websites. Many of them are long gone, sadly but these were the Myspaces and Facebooks of their time. We proudly showed what we loved on a site that was almost our own. To me showing your fandom on a Myspace page or Facebook just isn't the same as having your own site. For those who are still trucking on in Geocities, time to make a move before it's too late.

As an honor to the anime fan sites of old, I'll be going back to making "shrines" of different series and games. Some of which I have on here already and of course was the original point of my anime website in the first place. These "shrines" go beyond the typical blog post or archive and I won't them die on my watch. With this site and blog working with some of the anime companies directly, either it be promos (like the Naruto one recently) or through my store, I'll have more leverage to promote these series and give them some sort of permanent space on the web. One thing us true anime fans never do is forget a series we watched. We eventually go back to watching them again because anime means more to us than a simple cartoon show or the like, even as we get older.