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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."
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
RIP, Webmonkey.
IE actually makes a damn fine platform if you develop specifically for it, why is that so wrong?
That is what makes it so wrong; you have to develop specifically for it in order to make it do anything half-decent.
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.
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.
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.