I just read this in Dick Eastman's online genealogy newsletter:
"GeoCities to Shut Down. Now What?
Thousands of private individuals host their genealogy sites on the free
GeoCities service. Some of the sites have been there for years with
little or no updates from the owners. Now parent company Yahoo is ending
the free service.
Yahoo has posted the following notice at
http://www.geocities.com:
Sorry, new GeoCities accounts are no longer available.
Current GeoCities customers:
After careful consideration, we have decided to close GeoCities later
this year. We'll share more details this summer. For now, please sign in
or visit the help center for more information.
Yahoo is encouraging these customers to upgrade to Yahoo's paid Web
Hosting service.
If you own a site hosted on GeoCities, I would suggest copying your data
to your local hard drive immediately. Then you can look for a new service.
Copying an entire web site to your local hard drive is rather easy to
do. I wrote about that several years ago for Windows users at
http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2005/12/copy_an_entire_.html
and for Macintosh users at
http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2007/09/copy-an-entire-.html.
Both products have been updated since those articles were written but
the process remains the same.
You do not need to know any user names or passwords to copy
publicly-available web sites. In fact, you can even copy web sites that
you do not own. However, you will not be able to copy password-protected
pages or any information that is stored in databases and is displayed
only in dynamic web pages. I suspect there aren't many such pages hosted
at GeoCities so that appears to be a non-issue."