I had a dozen different geocities websites back in the mid / late 90's. Seems like every different hobby I had back then I would throw up a website.
It's true as someone said they really started to fall off and get a reputation for being somewhat of a joke when you had to start dealing with their horrible advertising design. I'm all for ads when you're using free hosting but man... geocities got bad, it got bad enough that I started losing interest in updating the sites.
Anyways, before all of these new apps that convert everything into HTML for you, my tool was notepad like many others, and surfing the internet for new HTML tricks.
I kind of miss making pages, but if you don't use it, you lose it. It's been nearly a decade since I have done any HTML and it almost seems hard to recall how to do iframes and other simple tricks.
Thanks Geocities for giving the early internet a place to throw up pages for free and share knowledge with the world.