An archive of 31k GeoCities badge images

Originally shared on Twitter on March 5th, 2024

One hallmark of the GeoCities era of user-generated internet was the 88x31 badge or button. Websites, including mine at the time, often had a collection of these either in a sidebar or at the bottom of the page. They proclaimed affiliation with, or often just fandom of, of some other group, website, software etc.

This idiom has been lost in the modern web, but much like my Winamp Skin Museum project attempts to preserve a moment in user-generated internet history, the seemingly anonymous site hellnet.work has scraped old GeoCities archives to extract a massive collection of these images. You can find it at: https://hellnet.work/8831/

They also wrote a lovely writeup about how they extracted the files and some analysis of the dataset: https://hellnet.work/8831/stats.html

Looking through some old archives of sites I built back in the day I found a few of these I had made. Please enjoy a laugh at my expense: