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Webmonkey Closes its Doors
An anonymous reader writes "According to Wired, Webmonkey is being closed by TerraLycos after 8 years of teaching practical web building skills and bucking more traditional outlets. They've written some good stuff over the years - in fact, I first understood the significance of XML after reading one of their articles."
this is old news, the article even says Feb 17th
mmm...
It does seem than web based content (on adverts alone) is unprofitable. I think micropayments will solve this - maybe PayPal could easily expand into this area by dropping the 39c transaction fee for transactions under a dollar...
IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
It should be noted that, ultimately, HotWired belong to Terra-Lycos, a Spanish company closely tied to the old monopoly Telefonica.
It's just a BloJJ
I read them frequently about 5 years ago and learned a lot about web building. Not that I always followed their good advice or anything :)
Was a great place to learn and find out that I was not really interested in going past the "hobby level" in that area. Like "one stop shopping" as it were. I suppose there are plenty of other places on the web now to find the same sort of thing.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Webmonkey's tutorials treated you like a five year-old with learning disabilities. They tried to be cute and informative at the same time- and failed at both.
Of course, those sites are so packed with ads they're functionally unusable, but still...
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
There is quite a bit of good useful content on Webmonkey. Has anyone considered saving it all for future reference? I know it would probably be illegal to put them up for free access somewhere else on the web due to copyrights, but it seems a shame for it all to go to waste completely :(
I learned a LOT of my HTML and related skills from webmonkey. They did good work, were always big advocates of standards, and a great resource no matter what your level of web work was. I personally am going to miss them greatly... makes me feel old (granted a LOT of things do that lately, but.. that's not the point now is it?).
CharlesP
wordtrip.com
Webmonkey was pretty good - I remember referring to it now and then... I know we can use the wayback machine / google (at least for a short while) etc. but if they're closing the doors, are they doing anything about the content ? Seems a shame to throw it away... Nothing mentioned on the site :-(
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
On behalf of all companies too cheap to by up-to-date reference books, I salute you WebMonkey. You've given me the information that has prevented me from robbing Barnes and Nobel countless times.
We'll always have Arhive.org, at least, although I'm not sure if they just mean that they are stopping adding new content or taking the place offline (yeah, RTFA, I know).
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
Let's take it to the next level! Have all websites charge a toll before you can even access them!!
If you don't have a credit card or have bad credit, no Internet for you!
They are not talking about this company.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
FWIW, I've found "W3Schools" a decent source of Pretty Good Tutorials for most things 'web (xml, xsl, css, etc.).
http://www.w3schools.com/
Some stuff seems IE centric - i.e.: some examples only work with IE6 and alternatives aren't suggested.
Mark
Rest well, WebMonkey. You taugh us all so much. Someone should e-mail them and ask if they can mirror the papers, so the legacy of the WebMonkey may live on forever.
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
It would be real slick to be able to buy a downloadable archive of articles. I'd gladly cough up some bucks for that. Certainly a lot better (not to mention more environmentally friendly) than bopping down to your favorite ink and paper store to buy some overpriced tome on how to make web pages.
How about it guys?
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Thanks to the wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.webmonkey. com has, for the most part, working links to a great deal of content, not to mention a nice view of the evolution of the graphic design proclivities.
Hopefully the terralycos lawyers won't ask the wayback to pull the content.
As an aside, I wonder, but am doubtful, about whether alternate licensing could be arranged for the content, perhaps some form of the Creative Commons License??
cleetus
Index DOT HTML
Index DOT CSS
And the Complete Idiots Guide to HTML 4. All three of those resources helped me a great deal, plus looking at other sites source code to see how they were made. Some of WMs articles were OK, but it wasn't exactly overly helpful to me.
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
I learned a lot of shit from webmonkey. I'm going to go as far as to say that they're doing a grave injustice to those who are just learning things like PHP by closing their doors. Hell, they're doing an injustice to the internet itself. It's built on knowledge, so I only hope their reference materials will be available in other formats.
I haven't been on Webmonkey for ages. However, when I did, I remember it as a resource that was unusual in the way that it was able to pander to both the inexperienced and the experienced alike. It provided a decent and friendly place for individuals to start learning about web design/programming, while also serving as a viable reference for experienced web designers.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Or is this even possible? Could they just throw all the articles into a big zip file and release them for download?
It would be a shame for them all to be lost, especially some of their articles on PHP and MySQL. Those helped a lot back when I was first learning.
At least SysAdmin (even if pretty clueless sometimes as an entity) and Linux magazine are still worth reading. Both contain enough code to keep the old brain cells churning.
And it was so sad that Web Techniques turned into a load of old wank aimed at PHBs - that, and TJP were the only ones I happily paid for.
Anyone else got any (reasonably priced) recommendations for geek mags that still keep the ol' brain cells working?
.02
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Since this is educational content, wouldn't it make sense to give/sell-on-the-cheap the content to a university somewhere to make it publicly available on the tons of available bandwidth most universities have? Some CS department somewhere could probably find student volunteers to maintain the site and update it with externally-submitted articles.
Or is TerraLycos going to sit on it for the next 95 years "just in case"?
Seems like a lot of these web "schools" that try to present all (or at least the common) facets of a subject are having trouble. Their product was access to content, and I think they've gone the way of most access providers.
When webmonkey (and others such as builder.com) started out, the web was such that it could be difficult to find resources about some topics. Thus, to have all these references collected in one place was pretty handy. Now, however, it's pretty easy to find resources (through google if nothing else) for just about anything, and you can get the resources from experts who are deeply involved with the topic (which may or may not be the case from one of the "schools").
So, like all other companies that make their money by providing access (e.g. ISPs, cable carriers), these schools must shift to instead offering a service. Granted, webmonkey did have somewhat of a service: Lots of n00b friendly articles all written in a similar format. But apparently that wasn't enough.
Why was this modded down? Its someone's opinion. Just because he does not agree with the article does not mean he sould be censored.
Archive.org is your friend!
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
Anyway, thanks for the link! :-)
There is no spoon or sig.
It seems as if TerraLycos is cleaning house and pulling the plug on unprofitable operations. Furthermore, it seems as if the Lycos search engine itself is one of those elements being downplayed.
The current Lycos Home Page still has the search box, but they're talking about the "new Lycos" which is all about the non-search sites that are part of the Lycos Network. It seems as if Lycos has fallen into an also-ran status.
Another classic search engine met the same fate a few years ago. When Infoseek was bought up by Disney, it was supposed to be the anchor of the Go Network. When that didn't work out, the core part of the Go Network shut down, leading to a Go Network homepage that does nothing but link to stories on the surviving Disney-owned sites and provide a Google-powered search box.
When we see Lycos Search powered by Google, we'll know that the layoff spree is complete...
A couple of you posted some links for archives and also metioned something about lawyers and licenses - as in it may be illegal to archive the site?. It would be nice if the Webmonkey folks gave their content to someone like GNU - officially so that their work would live on.
There is no spoon or sig.
You can just call up old articles by going to archive.org and entering the webmonkey.com URL. It's not efficient, but it seems to be there.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
It's sad to see em go, but I used to be a competitor of theirs until I cashed out my site (heh heh heh.
While they produced good articles, many of their articles were poorly written, or written far above the heads of their intended audience.
Back in the boom days, some of the WebMonkey employees got fed up with the corporate policies that valued ad placement over good content, often writing articles specifically tailored to woo the advertisers... a practice that clearly continued beyond the boom days. Those rebels started e-volt.. which still exists and is a vastly superior service.
Slashdot is successful because they provide content that their readers want... instead of what the advertisers want. A simple thing to understand unless you are a marketing professional.
The average marketing pro thinks that the average 'customer' doesn't know what to (think||read||buy) unless a marketeer tells them.
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
I would echo the sentiment of wanting a backup of all that content.
I just finished a small tutorial site this week for students at my high school. I remembered Webmonkey being a good resource for beginners (they even have a "kids" section), so I was psyched to see that it was still alive and kicking.
Now, two days after I posted a link to it at the top of my page of "useful links", Webmonkey goes under.
Anyone know of a good replacement tutorial site for the non- to semi-experienced webmaster?
Back when I was a n00b, webmonkey was the place I went to learn HTML. They've always been a neat and friendly place.
I was kind of assuming they'd close. In recent years they've been lacking on 'new' technologies, that's my impression. They were fairly strong years ago, when the web technologies were still overseeable und basic: html, javascript, cgi... and then nowadays it's just too much to cover for webmonkey.
Thanks WM for offering your *free* articles, they've been a great recource over the years.
Amen!
Bringing this back on topic, I read the XML article. I found it to be generally lacking in content. Similarly, I found the style to me rather silly and unconvincing.
I went on to read several other articles and none of which I found to be very good. All of the information that I obtained from the website I have seen elsewhere in a much better form.
I have never heard of Webmonkey until today. From what I can tell, this doesn't seem to be much of a loss.
posted this story 10 days back. Was rejected. funny, really funny.
"Isn't the site already dead?"
"No, I'm not."
IMHO, while they were great for beginners and I loved going there, it seemed they stoped making any significant additions to their content years ago -- and this was part of their downfall. The wired article even mentions how they often reshuffled old content to make it seem new.
meep
... still is one.
-- me
Hello, Since webmonkey is going down, what are some others resources that you guys find equally well? I know of Arson Network. What about you guys?
Why would Paypal want to do that ... if they wont collect any fees?
caritj.org
This might seem like a bad joke but people getting laid off from webmonkey team might make a use of this:
Webmonkey Tips
2004-02-15 00:09:41 Whole Webmonkey staff laid off... (articles,quickies) (rejected) :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
RIP, Webmonkey.
Dr. Dobbs.
It mostly focuses on semi to non-trivial topics that would be found useful by those working in industry. At the same time the articles are usually well written and easier to digest than the academic papers on the same topics.
It's not exactly web-centric though.
Oh yeah. I forgot about DDJ. I found it useful for grounding in prinicles, but not relevant enough to my everyday work to justify a subscription once my free year had run out.
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Mulder's Style Sheet Tutorial on Webmonkey is one of my favorite style-sheet references.
Table-ized A.I.
This is not about knocking the webmonkey people.
I just want to point out as an ex-Wired employee from back in the day, that this article is full of lies and crap about what was going on inside at the time.
First off, webmonkey wasn't even remotely close to profitable and certainly wasn't the only profitable website wired had if I'm wrong and there was some random day where they eeked out a penny. Hotbot was Wired's cash cow for years. It's the only service that made enough money to pay for the hardware, bandwidth and staff to run it. Webmonkey? Maybe if you don't charge against the site for equipment, staff, bandwidth, and power, then uhm, sure, ok, they made a penny.
Second, the idea that the webmonkey people were these oppressed geeks who wrote content in their spare time for free is a complete fabrication. The webmonkey people would sometimes lower themselves from their prima dona perch and help out the rest of us little people here and there but they had very little interaction with the rest of the company. And they sure as hell didn't write for free on the side. Webmonkey staff did nothing but write a few articles and sit on the couch in the play room right off their quad playing Tekken4 all day. I guess sometimes they would go out for a long triple mocha latte break after coming in late so they'd have the energy to leave early.
Webmonkey, I love you guys but you weren't what Wired was about. It was just as well Lycos came in and killed the company. It was DOA anyway.
The article is all propaganda.
2004-02-17 23:02:43 Webmonkey, RIP: 1996 - 2004 (articles,news) (rejected)
Summary:
rejected (1)
Webmonkey - that funky Monkey
Webmonkey - junkie
That funky Monkey
Got this dance that's more than real
Drink Webmonkey - here's how you feel
Put your left leg down - your right leg up
Tilt your head back - let's finish the cup
M.C.A. with the bottle - D. rocks the can
Adrock gets nice with Charlie Chan
We're offered Moet - we don't mind Chivas
Wherever we go with bring the Monkey with us
Adrock drinks three - Mike D. is D.
Double R. foots the bill most definitely
I drink Webmonkey and I rock well
I got a Castle in Brooklyn - that's where I dwell
well I was going to use wget to pull down a local copy of one of their snapshots but they've got a robots.txt file up there and wget respects it...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Ha. In the linked article on XML on page 4, in section "Recipe For Disaster", there's a link to Lark, Tim Bray's XML Parser. When I click that link I get...
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
I know the story isn't about XML per se, but by sheer coincidence I've been checking out XML recently so I thought I'd have a look at Lark. LOL. I hope this experience isn't a precursor of what I'm about to get into!
Netcraft confirms, Webmonkey is dy... fuck it.
Life is offtopic.
I will miss Webmonkey too. I have learned many things about web building in the "early days" from the articles that have been posted there.
A thousand monkeys, typing on a thousand typewriters cannot keep a site running.
Josh
And make a mirror copy for your own personal edification.
-CorProphet, too lazy to log in.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I learned a lot back in the day from Webmonkey. Well, as long as they don't pull the plug on Cocktail.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Thank God! Hopefully this means that people at the level this site catered to have realized that they are not needed in the computer industry and have moved on.
I see a lot of Java programming for idiots sites that seem to be in their final death throws too. Thank God!
It seems like the problem with the boom is that it attracted and ecouraged a lot of people who have no business being within 10 feet of a computer.
Well, when I finally gave up that dream, I released the Guide as Open Content. Anybody who wants to can publish the content as they see fit. AFAIK, nobody's made a fortune off of my work (which, I admit, would bug the crap out of me), but some people have been helped, which is pretty cool. I wonder if WebMonkey will consider doing the same thing.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
"With Microsoft products like Frontpage and IIS anybody can become a web genius. "
That's like saying "With a penis or a vagina, anyone can become a good parent."
Total size is 450MB, compressed down to 130MB using WinRAR 3.3.
View info and download the torrent here.
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
I think what you meant to say was:
.html extension for your viewing
wget -k -p -nh -E -nc -r -l 6 \
hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey
convert links
get prerequisites
don't dns everything
add a
don't clobber (download only once)
recursive
levels 6
slashdot wouldn't let my lines be long enough, so a \ : )
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
click to download (no reg required; right click, save as)
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
Why did you simply discontinue it, when you could have GPL'd it and let someone else carry on the work?
Such a waste...
The trick is to make the advertising the content. Considering how 'unbiased and objective' the average game review is, I'm suprised the reviewers aren't getting paid by the game companies...
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
I too have used them as a resource a long time ago. In that respect I think it's sad to see them go since they were helpful to me at one point. But, I haven't been to their site for a long time, so it doesn't really affect me I suppose. It would be nice if their good content could stay online for a few years or so, before it all becomes irrelivent. Hmm, but it seems to me I thought projectcool was more useful.
So patch your binary (change "robots.txt" to "rogots.txt," for example). Or recompile. wget's open source.
I tried this with wget prior to slashdot breaking the story, but each attempt failed. I tried the following:
.html, but in site.com/foldertoarchive/99/46/index1a.html?tw=mor estuff
.html?tw=morestuff instead of .html
.html
.html extension, with the ?tw= stripped off.
.html and strip off
wget -vmp -np --cookies=off, wget -vEmp -np --cookies=off, wget -vFmp -np --cookies=off, wget -vmp -np --cookies=off,
In each case, I'm getting failures. I get the following failures (I changed webmonkey to a generic site name so I wouldn't cause a stampede, ahem slashdot):
--04:52:19-- http://site.com/foldertoarchive/98/37/index3a.html ?tw=interestingstuff
=>
`site.com/foldertoarchive/98/37/index3a.html?t w=in terestingstuff'
Connecting to site.com[2xx.2xx.2xx.1xx]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]
site.com/foldertoarchive/98/37/index3 a.html?tw=int erestingstuff.html: Invalid argument
Cannot write to
`site.com/foldertoarchive/98/37/index3a.html?t w=in terestingstuff.html'
(Invalid argument).
I believe I'm getting the failures because the file it is trying to write to disk is not ending in
where it is in
I'm guessing that the link is being rewritten to refer to another location
where the file resides, or some other type of rewriting being done by the web
server. Or its a scripting extension, adding ?+ to the end of
If I visit the pages (files) individually, the same appears in the browser, but when I save the pages individually to the same directories that the wget -m command creates, it correctly saves the page with the proper
If there's a way to tell wget to change the extension to
the extraneous ?tw=, it would work I think.
Also, the ?tw= is the same on all the failures, but after the "=" the text immediately after changes for each directory.
The result of what I'm getting is the index page being saved, and then further
pages for each directory failing, where the pages are:
index0a.html (saves)
index0a_page2.html?tw=stuff (fails with "invalid argument", using wget)
index0a_page2.html?tw=stuff (succeeds in saving as index0a_page2.html, showing original ((index0a_page2.html?tw=stuff)) in browser window, using konqueror, not wget)
index0a_page3.html?tw=stuff (fails with "invalid argument", using wget)
index0a_page3.html?tw=stuff (succeeds in saving as index0a_page3.html, showing original ((index0a_page2.html?tw=stuff)) in browser window, using konqueror, not wget)
index1a.html (saves)
index1a_page2.html?tw=stuff (fails with "invalid argument", using wget)
index1a_page2.html?tw=stuff (succeeds in saving as index1a_page2.html, showing original ((index1a_page2.html?tw=stuff)) in browser window, using konqueror, not wget)
and so on.
And a followup earlier post on this issue:
I should have been a bit more clear on this part:
Also, the ?tw= is the same on all the failures, but after the "=" the text immediately after changes for each directory.
The result of what I'm getting is the index page being saved, and then further pages for each directory failing, where the pages are:
index0a.html (saves)
index0a_page2.html?tw=stuff (fails with "invalid argument", using wget)
index0a_page2.html?tw=stuff (succeeds in saving as index0a_page2.html,
showing original ((index0a_page2.html?tw=stuff)) in browser window, using konqueror, not wget)
index0a_page3.html?tw=stuff (fails with "invalid argument", using wget)
index0a_page3.html?tw=stuff (succeeds in saving as index0a_page3.html,showing original ((index0a_page2.html?tw=stuff)) in browser window, using konqueror, not wget)
index1a.html (saves)
index1a_page2.html?tw=stuff (fails with "invalid argument
Thanks to all for their kind comments about Webmonkey.
Despite what you've read here, we're not shutting down the site - it's just going into maintenance mode. That means no more updates, but all the old content will remain.
- Anonymous (TerraLycos) Coward
hah like id let someone see my code, id be banned from slashdot
in my version of wget -m is equiv to -r -l inf -N -nr (nr is an ftp only option)
Mainly I didn't use it because -r -l 6 was the example, and I was tired. But, I'll admit your kung fu was better than mine, at least about -m.
I still think you want
wget -m -k -E -nh -nc hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey
mirror
convert links to work locally
add an html extension
don't dns everything
download only once
with the options I originally listed (l 6) it was 54 MB. Now I'll make it spider again (but not download everything) 'cause I was stupid.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
I guess maybe in my tiredness then I remembered something I forgot in my ultra tiredness now:
you can't -nc (not clobber old files) and timestamp -N
So you do have to
wget -r -l inf -k -E -nh -nc \ hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey
if you want it to work and not clobber. (meaning, you can do it repeatedly, and it figures it out.)
And, I think the AC was looking for -k
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Actually, it's 29 cents. Plus 2.9% of the transacted amount. So from a dollar, they would take 33 cents.
US sites charge an average of $20 cpm (per thousand views). A site with 8 million unique vistors can expect around 80 million page views a month. This is an inventory value of around $3.2 million/month (presuming two ads per page).
Obviously sites have been struggling to fill there inventory, but this is changing...