I Just Found My 2001 ‘Harry Potter’ Geocities Site And Must Share My Pain

Friends, I was delivered a gift yesterday.

The gift was the website Wayback Machine. I’m sure you are all across it, but I was not. It’s basically a site where you can pop in the link of an old website that no longer exists in, and it’ll find the old link.

That is not the technical explanation for what it does, but when it comes to computer things I am very dumb, OK? It just brings it back. I don’t know how, I don’t care.

The point is – I managed to remember my Harry Potter fansite I ran when I was 14, and brought it back to life.

Bit of a background. Two school friends and I were deeply, DEEPLY obsessed with Harry Potter. As I’m sure many of us were. But we took that obsession to the next level, and created an entire website – complete with Hogwarts school, fanfic, and reviews of the books and films – and ran it for several years.

It’s magnificent and it is terrifying. It is also entirely written in fluoro.

Simply from reading that home page, I think you can gauge just how extensive this site was. It had all the usual shit fan sites have, like incredibly nerdy knowledge on the books.

Earth to 14 year old Mel – no one gives a fuck about the Belgian translations of character names.

It had an “ode to the dead” section, which was essentially our takes on characters who had passed on. As an aside, how savage am I? Sorry, Courtney.

Apparently, Courtney really liked Cedric Diggory, because she also made an entire page dedicated to Dumbledore‘s speech for him.

Although I can’t talk considering I made a page dedicated to our “views” on important HP plot points.

Also I stand by my take that Dumbledore was secretly evil.

Hands down though, the best bit of the site is the Hogwarts school.

Yep, we made an entire SCHOOL.With a Diagon Alley, for students to “shop” in. How they shopped, I do not know – but every member of the school had a… Gringotts account?

Why was anyone spending their fake money. On anything. But especially on robes when we a) didn’t have any real ones to send anyone and b) absolutely did not have the technology for Skyping in a Yule Ball even if we did have robes.

Gryffindor was smashing it, though. I have a feeling we sorted people into whatever house they felt like being in, hence Gryffindor’s immense success.

We made members do homework (!!!) I have no idea who Professor Shager was, and it was in all likelihood some terrifying man on the internet we should not have been talking to.

I do know that Icicle was one of our friends, who moonlighted as the Potions professor.

We also, for some unknown reason, made a really extensive list of “You know you’re obsessed with Harry Potter when…” jokes. Well, “jokes”.

In true 14 year old style, we were obsessed with ourselves and thought everyone needed to read our takes on, well, everything.

(I mean what has changed – I’m literally sitting here showing you the ins and outs of my teen fan site, so..)

The best part of this one is the amount of exclamation marks.

I will say this, people seemed to love our site. Look at the guest book!

I absolutely think Keith was trying to murder us.

The absolute piece-de-resistance though was our fanfic, which for some reason we called “The RPG“, even though I do not think this is what a Role Play Game looks like. It’s absolutely terrible fanfic.

Anyway this has been an exciting foray into my teen past, hope you’ve enjoyed, let’s never speak of this again bye.

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