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In 1997, Geocities sat somewhere on my 12-year-old self’s scale of important activities, just below fighting with my younger brother and playing the Spice Girls on loop.

It was a big deal. It may seem strange that a free Web site-hosting company ranked so highly on a young girl’s list of priorities, but hey, I was a weird kid. Before Blogger, Facebook or MySpace, Geocities was one of the few places online where you could take a little piece of the Web and call it your own. And for this weird kid stuck in a very small town in Australia, that was exciting.

In just one of their many valiant attempts to improve our education and delay us from taking up the local young persons’ hobby of drinking cheap beer behind public buildings, my parents rushed to get us a computer and a modem as soon as the first local Internet service provider opened in our town.

We were enthralled the first time we used the Web, at the ISP’s tiny office bordering the local industrial estate. As my brother and I looked at the Disney Web site, my dad quizzed the ISP owner.

“So, this site is coming from America, right?” Dad asked. The owner nodded.

Our jaws dropped open. It only took 15 minutes to load this page that had come all the way from the USA! We could all see that the Internet was going to open up amazing possibilities.

As soon as I got home from after-school ballet, drama or music classes, I’d log on. I’d open up Netscape, the modem would make its bleeps and screeches, and then I’d start exploring the world at roughly 2 kilobytes a second. Soon, I had my own e-mail address, an e-pen friend in New York and was using HTML-based Web chat where you had to manually refresh the page every time you wanted to update the conversation.

After a year or so of mucking around, it was time to get down to business and build my Web page empire. So I signed up with Geocities, started teaching myself HTML by looking at the coding of other pages, stole some flashing animated GIF images and garish tiled backgrounds. Soon, the creatively titled “Ashlee’s Home Page” was born. It contained some information about Australia, a guestbook for people to leave a message and inspiring passages written in Comic Sans font, all about my love for ballet, flute lessons and boy bands. Redesigning my page became an obsession and I would add new blinking images of twirling ballerinas, shooting stars and a certain member of the Backstreet Boys almost weekly.

Geocities was one of the very first online communities with which I became very involved. The Web sites on the service were arranged into “neighborhoods,” based around common interests such as music, family, movies or pets. Each neighborhood had volunteer “community leaders” who helped others build their sites and fostered the sense of online togetherness.

The community leader system meant that many others from all over the world were willing to help this kid in Australia build her undeniably ugly and pointless Web site.

Once my HTML was fluent, I returned the favor by becoming a community leader myself, at the tender age of 11. I believe I was the youngest ever, but I can’t seem to find any Guinness Book of World Records information to verify this staggering fact, strangely enough. I spent my weekends helping other “homesteaders,” the lingo for Geocities Web site owners, with their ugly pages and trying to organize online community events for about four years.

In 1999, Geocities was bought out by Yahoo! and the takeover was the death knell for the community leader program as the neighborhood structure of the site was gradually phased out. So I resigned from my post and my interests and shifted to other geeky online pursuits, such as blogging and message board moderation.

On Oct. 26 this year, Geocities will finally close for good. My early pages vanished from the Internet a long time ago and once I moved on from Geocities, the gap it left in my life was easily replaced by a mix of blogging, hard liquor, rock and roll and employment. But I will always have a soft spot for what Geocities once was —a strong online community.

It had run well past its expiry date and looks like quite the dinosaur in comparison with Facebook, Twitter and the Wordpress-powered sites that are the norm for many amateurs these days. But in its heyday, it was a pioneer.

If you’re sad that you missed “Ashlee’s Home Page” or other Web 1.0 masterpieces, never fear. Just head over to MySpace, where the legacy of teens cluttering up the Internet with nonsensical blocks of text partially obscured by flashing rainbows and photos of Miley Cyrus continues.

Ashlee Betteridge is a Web desk copy editor with the Jakarta Globe.