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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?"
What a weird statement... like saying "It might not be the beginning of the end, but it might be the beginning of the end of the middle."
Besides, the end of the end is "d".
*me flings poo at coworkers in act of celebration*
where there is demand there will be supply; its a standard law of economics.. there were enough people who wanted it back for lycos to bring it back... i know a lot of developers who were quite inconvenienced when webmonkey was shut down...
First day and 50,000 hits. Referers? Well mostly from one website... well no it's mostly just the front page...
Definitely serving up new ads... five ads on the front page alone. Argh.
The Army reading list
I personally havn't used web monkey as a development resource since about 1998, because I have found information elsewhere. It seems as if WebMonkey lost it's edge around that time. Has anyone else had the same experience?
... they can't be *Zombies* if they're back from the dead. Resurrected != Zombiefied.
Zombie webmonkey
I jumped out of my chair in happiness thinking that my old buddy the bonzi monkey's back
(I will adjust with the clippy for the time being)
said it best:
"Oh, dear, he's had a sudden and completely unexpected relapse of death!"
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"
Proper (X)HTML/CSS coding has become more prevalent recently so I'd have to say the entire site is becoming depecrated.
Maybe they'll revamp their information, who knows.
--- March, milde, march!
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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.
Evolution or ID?
Take a look at A List Apart, they're a bit into CSS but that's a Good Thing really.
I don't need no steenkin' webmonkey.
"hehe, website" - Homer Simpson
This is like New Coke, where everyone went up in arms when Coca-Cola was going to get rid of the original formula. All kinds of people rallied and the Original Coca-Cola gained tons of popularity and PR.
Many suspected that Coca-Cola Corp had pulled off one of the best PR stunts of all time, that they had never intended on getting rid of the original. Do you think this is what Terra Lycos has done with WebMonkey?
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Anyone else find it amusing that a site that wants to teach people HTML doesn't even have a DTD and has to resort to putting "warez" in its metatags? Twice.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
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...
Web monkey was my first real PHP, MySQL and JavaScript online resource. It's tutorials were always clear, fun and extremely "hands on".
WebMonkey was probably the best place for a beginner to learn the basis of Internet development.
I'm sure allot of Perl "holier than thou" developers will bash me for this, but somehow I feel the web will be worse off without such a valuable help do web development newbies.
www.enterweb.pt
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...
http://efil.blogspot.com/
and forgot to update the copyright dates everywhere?
The year in a copyright notice tells when a work was first published. If each individual article is a separate work, then of course some works might have been first published in 2003.
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.