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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."
A site like that is no longer needed. With Microsoft products like Frontpage and IIS anybody can become a web genius. And from anywhere, allowing web development to be offshored to cheaper, better, faster countries.
It's more than closely tied, actually Terra Belongs to Telefonica. Telefonica :)
Telefonica is not as big as AT&T, but they are as evil
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
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 :(
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
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.
What are you some kind of communist? The Internet is about making profit not some crazy hippie idea of freely exchanging knowledge for the benefit of mankind. Did you use the useless network of networks called the Internet before it began to be commercialized around 1993? I doubt it. There was nothing there except research papers and the occasional MUD or usenet article. Not until sites like Amazon or eBay came along did the Internet become truly useful.
I can't tell if you are joking or not, which is scary.
I know you probably are, but I've also known people who think exactly like that.
Heh.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
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
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.
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
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.
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
"With Microsoft products like Frontpage and IIS anybody can become a web genius." God, I hope you were kidding. What a ridiculous statement! With products like Frontpage, anybody can churn out incomprehensible, invalid, bloated crap that only works (and barely at that) in one browser. Sure, anyone can make *something* with programs like Frontpage, but that doesn't mean it will be good, or even usable. How many sites have you seen with incomprehensible navigation (or no navigation to speak of), with such horrible design you can't even read the content, with....the list goes on. There's a hell of a lot more to becoming a web designer/developer than cobbbling together some html. There are UI considerations, information architecture, maintainability of code, and much more. Does picking up a copy of Quicken make one a CPA? If so, a lot of high-prices CFO's are out of a job!
RIP, Webmonkey.
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.