Zombie Webmonkey: Back From the Dead?

Mirkon writes "Back in mid-February, the news was broken that Webmonkey, one of the web's most prominent web development tutorial and reference resources, was "shut down," in that no new content would be delivered. A little over four months later - though Wired News (another child of Webmonkey's parent company, Terra Lycos) says nothing, and the Webmonkey Blog (hosted on Tripod, another Terra Lycos subsidiary) hasn't seen an update since January - the Webmonkey home page boldly declares: "We're totally back! Webmonkey is alive and kicking, serving up new articles all hot-n-fresh like a stack of banana pancakes. With syrup." Is this the end of the end for Webmonkey?"

Comments

I really hope so

[SlashDread]

No other source of free information has been so usefull in developing my (rather lame by 2004 standards) homepage, and thus web knowladge.

I loved it, recommended it to all I knew interested in webdesign, and by bog, more designers could learn from it.

"/Dread"

Re:All hail Webmonkey!

[Anonymous Coward]

That depends of who made the coffee this morning.

Re:Relevance?

[kir]

What he said.

Oh yeah... and my eyes STILL BLEED when I view that page. Someone should be shot for that layout and color scheme.

Re:WYSIWYG, why webmonkey?

[millahtime]

Creating a web page without knowing HTML is like driving a car without knowing how to read.

I wouldn't say that. I would say it's like driving a car without knowing how it works under the hood. And there are a lot of people that don't know how a car works under the hood but can get done what they need to do.

O'Reilly Net and A List Apart

[Infonaut]

Agreed. WebMonkey has pretty much outlived its usefulness to professional Web developers. I find the stuff on O'Reilly Net and A List Apart to be a lot more up to date (obviously) and relevant.

Re:WYSIWYG, why webmonkey?

[kryptkpr]

Not quite.. driving a car is closer to browsing the resultant webpage.

Creating a page without knowing HTML/CSS is like assembling an entire car without knowing how any of the pieces work. It may work for very, very simple cars but if something goes wrong, or happens not the way you expect, you have no idea what's wrong or how to fix it.

Re:WYSIWYG, why webmonkey?

[argent]

Millah, old bean, I meant what I said: you don't need to understand the internals of the MS HTML Control or the Gecko Runtime Environment or IIS or Apache, which is what's "under the hood", but if you don't know HTML then it's like driving a car while being functionally illiterate. I know quite a few people people who are functionally illiterate in English who have no problem driving a car so long as they know where they're going, or they've got someone to help them, or they stay in the part of Houston where I live where all the street-signs are in English and Chinese.

So, you can get along not knowing HTML, but you won't have the faintest idea what to do if anything goes wrong. If you get into the equivalent of a strange part of town, you're stuck. If there's a detour, you better hope you understand which set of arrows to follow...

Back from the dead?

[manavendra]

Dunno if this is the "end of the end" (grimace) for webmonkey, but I stopped using it when they fell for that oh-so-common trap - mindless adverts, popups, flash-ads

I guess that's why a lot of other people stopped using it...

Re:obvious

[desertfish]

Yeah, I was bummed I couldn't read for the 900th time that PHP/MySQL tutorial from '99.

Webmonkey great for beginers

[drgonjo]

I've found myself training some young newbs in the finer points of web dev. I notice that despite my best efforts in explanation I often slip bits of techno jargon in which leave my trainees looking confused and bewildered. Though I hadn't used webmonkey in years (ie. my newb days) I remembered that jargon was either avoided or thoughtfully introduced, something I seemed incapable of doing. So now I create lists of webmonkey articles for my newbs to peruse prior to their hands-on lessons with me. Long story short, webmonkey is a great resource for beginners but a bit dumbed down for the slashdot crowd.

Taking a pass

[shokk]

I don't consider "Punch the kangaroo for a free web cam taking up 1/3 of the page" being a significant contribution to web publishing. The Macromedia Contribute article required you to click "Next Page" every three sentences, which I'm sure was a great way to maximize eyeballs per page of advertisements. No thanks, I'll pass.