Ancient Web: Ron Horii Moved His Bay Area Guide Out of GeoCities

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Ron Horii's website feels less like a travel publication than a very knowledgeable local friend who has been saving photographs, trail notes, and links for decades.

Visit Ron Horii's Bay Area parks and travel website

The pages cover San Francisco Bay Area parks, hikes, history, recreation, and nearby destinations. The remarkable part is not simply how much material is present. Horii explains exactly how these pages survived the disappearance of their earlier homes.

From answering questions to maintaining a public guide

In his site's history, Horii recalls contributing to Prodigy and other travel bulletin boards before creating Bay Area Back Pages on Prodigy in 1997. He kept seeing the same questions about where to hike, camp, bike, swim, or take children. A web page meant he could provide a durable answer instead of rewriting one every time.

He later maintained separate GeoCities sites for Bay Area Parks, Santa Teresa County Park, the Santa Teresa Hills, Almaden Quicksilver, and other subjects. When Yahoo shut down GeoCities in October 2009, he moved much of that work to domains he controlled.

His migration notes name the original GeoCities addresses, their new destinations, and preservation copies kept by projects such as Oocities, Geocities.ws, and the Internet Archive. Horii also warns that some links on the older pages are now broken. That is careful preservation, not a claim that time stood still.

The local detail a general guide misses

The main site continues to collect park-event coverage, nature and historic-site photographs, lists of recreation resources, and volunteer activity. Santa Teresa and Almaden Quicksilver receive the sort of sustained attention rarely found on a tourism homepage.

Horii's interest is more than recreational. His biography documents many years of volunteer work for Santa Clara County parks and a long involvement in photography and local historical interpretation. Images here are field notes as well as scenery.

The navigation can be daunting. Long lists branch into still longer lists, with links from different eras living together. But that abundance is precisely why the site is useful. A local trail, a demolished structure, a seasonal festival, or a historic ranch might receive a place in the record without ever being selected for a citywide travel campaign.

Horii kept his older addresses visible instead of hiding the migrations. His site shows how a personal online reference can outlive Prodigy, free hosting, and several generations of fashionable layout.

Explore the main site and its GeoCities migration history.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.