I mentioned in my last post that I've been so busy recently that I had no chance of doing any treats for rarewomen. So what was going on? Well, you may recall that Yahoo! shut down GeoCities back in the fall of 2009. I guess we all knew the writing was on the wall, and it would only be a matter of time before we'd lose all of the old "free" webhosting services. The owners of FortuneCity have just gone over entirely to paid sites, closing all their old sites down on the 1st of May.

Unlike the loss of GeoCities, though, this had little or no publicity. Admittedly, they did attempt to contact the website owners by e-mail; but, of course, that would assume the addresses to be current. They also put a banner up—and, by "up", I mean up with the ads, where of course we all go looking for messages! In fact, I looked at one FortuneCity site several times in April; but, as I was interested in a text page, I had no chance of spotting any banners, since they don't appear unless there's Javascript to manifest them.

( As a result, the first I knew of it all was after the sites had actually gone down. )