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The Internet Programming IT Technology

Webmonkey Closes its Doors 162

Posted by CowboyNeal from the thanks-for-all-the-fish dept.
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."
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Webmonkey Closes its Doors More

Webmonkey Closes its Doors

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  • old news (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:19PM (#8416679)
    this is old news, the article even says Feb 17th
    mmm...

  • First sign that web based content is unprofitable? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by aldoman ( 670791 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:19PM (#8416683) Homepage
    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...

  • Spanish company (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jmerelo ( 216716 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:20PM (#8416686) Homepage Journal
    It should be noted that, ultimately, HotWired belong to Terra-Lycos, a Spanish company closely tied to the old monopoly Telefonica [telefonica.es].

  • Wow! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GMontag ( 42283 ) <gmontag AT guymontag DOT com> on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:22PM (#8416703) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:25PM (#8416709)
      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.

      • Re:Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by gecko85 ( 725306 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @02:27PM (#8417343)
        "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!

        • Re:Wow! (Score:4, Insightful)

          by DerekLyons ( 302214 ) <fairwater@@@gmail...com> on Sunday February 29, 2004 @05:09AM (#8421572) Homepage
          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.
          Many, and a large proportion of them *aren't* by Frontpage users but by web designers who really should know better. And frankly with the coming of CSS and XHTML, and all the other so called 'improvements', the number of bloated, slow, horrible sites is *increasing*. Too many web designers spend too much time on 'UI considerations, information architecture, maintainability of code, and much more' and very little time on making sure the damm thing works and that the content on the pages is actually acessible.

    • Re:Wow! (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      When webmonkey first came out --- their "wink wink see how easy this is" tutorials were like a breath of fresh air. The tone of their articles conveyed a warmth of being tutored by a fellow geek. Once I got my legs, tho, I stopped visiting. Their site was too disorganized to be a good reference site (contrast to sites like devguru.com).
      • It WAS a treasure trove of information. Sometimes I don't want to read the 39 chapter o'pedantic and assoc. book on the exact meaning of the word "dynamic", sometimes I just want a brief overview and a little example.
        Unfortunately, most sites of the type seem to have died, with webmonkey being one of the last.
        IMO, the web was destined for suckiness when C/net killed winfiles, this is just elaboration.

    • Re:Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by glass_window ( 207262 )
      Is there anything being done to retain this vast wealth of well presented knowledge for other's who have yet to benefit from webmonkey? When I first started getting into making a web page the first thing I realized is that there are a lot of people that have written quite a bit on the subjects, but none of them have done it in a way that a beginner would understand. Then I came across webmonkey and I was amazed. I used their website to get into html, stylesheets, dhtml, and there was quite a bit that I n

  • nah (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Bidet Martini ( 747300 )
    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.

  • Content... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ianoo ( 711633 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:25PM (#8416712) Journal
    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 :(

  • This is kind of depressing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BFedRec ( 257522 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:25PM (#8416714) Homepage
    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
    • Think you're bummed? This is the first time I've heard of it. After reading a few things, I wish I had known if it back when I was first fiddling with html and php. Would have made things go much more smoothly.

  • Howabout an archive (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:25PM (#8416715) Journal
    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

  • Salute! (Score:5, Funny)

    by use_compress ( 627082 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:26PM (#8416716) Journal
    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.

  • At first I thougth they meant Primate Programming (Score:3, Funny)

    by nitehawk214 ( 222219 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:28PM (#8416732)
    They are not talking about this company [newtechusa.com].

  • An Alternative to Webmonkey (Score:5, Informative)

    by snookerdoodle ( 123851 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:28PM (#8416734)
    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

  • Noo! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nicholas Evans ( 731773 ) <OwlManAtt@gmail.com> on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:29PM (#8416737) Homepage
    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.

  • Downloadable archive? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sdo1 ( 213835 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:29PM (#8416739) Journal
    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

  • Not Completely Lost... [karma whore warning] (Score:5, Informative)

    by cleetus ( 123553 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:32PM (#8416750) Homepage
    Thanks to the wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.webmonkey. com [archive.org] 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 [creativecommons.org]??

    cleetus

  • For great design tutorials (Score:5, Informative)

    by JoeBaldwin ( 727345 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:32PM (#8416754) Homepage Journal
    Index DOT HTML [blooberry.com]

    Index DOT CSS [blooberry.com]

    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.

  • Man, this really pisses me off (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Melvin Daniels ( 757374 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:33PM (#8416757) Journal
    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.

  • It's a jewel of rarity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by HungWeiLo ( 250320 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:36PM (#8416768)
    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.

  • And with the death of Web Techniques magazine... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cliveholloway ( 132299 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:40PM (#8416788) Homepage Journal
    .. (a year or so ago) and The Perl Journal, there goes the rest of the teachers from my early coding days.

    At least SysAdmin [samag.com] (even if pretty clueless [perlmonks.org] sometimes as an entity) and Linux magazine [linux-mag.com] 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 [webtechniques.com] aimed at PHBs - that, and TJP [tpj.com] 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 ;-)

  • .edu (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:40PM (#8416789)
    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"?

  • all-in-one web "schools" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nuffle ( 540687 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:41PM (#8416798)
    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.

  • Lycos, RIP (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:45PM (#8416820)
    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 [lycos.com] 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 [go.com] 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...

    • Re:Lycos, RIP (Score:5, Informative)

      by self assembled struc ( 62483 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:50PM (#8416847) Homepage
      actually, the lay off spree is mostly complete.

      i worked for tripod/angelfire for 4 years as their senior web developer (even wrote an article for webmonkey on PHP photo galleries) and at the time they closed webmonkey, lycos laid off most of it's employees who worked for "non-core" business parts now.

      pretty much they (terra) are focusing on the money-making aspects (proudly tripod/angelfire seems to be one of these) and cutting the rest of the crap.

  • Put the website on GNU? or.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MisanthropicProggram ( 597526 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @12:49PM (#8416840)
    somewhere else for access?

    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.

  • It's sad (Score:5, Informative)

    by w3weasel ( 656289 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @01:01PM (#8416897) Homepage
    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.
    • 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.

      Actually, evolt wasn't started by webmonkey employees, but by members of the monkeyjunkies mailing list which webmonkey sponsored.. Read the history of that stuff [evolt.org]

  • sad they're closing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sicnarf ( 529730 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @01:02PM (#8416906) Homepage
    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.

  • Other Sources? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28, 2004 @01:52PM (#8417180)
    Hello, Since webmonkey is going down, what are some others resources that you guys find equally well? I know of Arson Network [arson-network.com]. What about you guys?
    • Anonymous Coward wrote:

      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?

      Besides W3Schools [w3schools.com] which has been mentioned in this Slashdot discussion sometimes, I like Dev Shed - http://www.devshed.com/ [devshed.com]. It has lots of nice tutorials/articles about Perl, PHP, Java (including JSP), Python, XML, MySQL, Flash, etc...

      There was also a very nice discussion in Slashdot, around two years ago, about online resources for

  • Flamebait (Score:4, Funny)

    by $exyNerdie ( 683214 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @02:07PM (#8417245) Homepage Journal

    This might seem like a bad joke but people getting laid off from webmonkey team might make a use of this:

    Webmonkey Tips [lycos.com]

  • Style sheet reference (Score:2, Informative)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 )
    Mulder's Style Sheet Tutorial [lycos.com] on Webmonkey is one of my favorite style-sheet references.

  • Article full of historic revisionism (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28, 2004 @02:58PM (#8417526)
    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.
  • Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system:

    2004-02-17 23:02:43 Webmonkey, RIP: 1996 - 2004 (articles,news) (rejected)

    Summary:

    rejected (1)

  • 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!

  • ... and Paul Boutin [paulboutin.com] is writing about a subject that he knows about, because he has written several good articles [google.com] in Webmonkey [lycos.com]

    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.

  • And so it proves... (Score:3, Funny)

    by stateofmind ( 756903 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @04:04PM (#8417954)
    A thousand monkeys, typing on a thousand typewriters cannot keep a site running.

    Josh
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Will they release it Open Content? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SnappingTurtle ( 688331 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @05:37PM (#8418526) Homepage
    Back when I had high hopes that The Idocs Guide to HTML [idocs.com] would be my path to riches, I thought of WebMonkey as my chief competitor. There was no way I could produce the quantity of documentation they could, but I hoped that my narrow focus on client-side web pages features and high quality would win me followers. In fact, it did win me followers, but not enough to become profitable.

    Well, when I finally gave up that dream, I released the Guide as Open Content. Anybody [htmlcodetutorial.com] who [estek.net] wants [webmasterexchange.com] to [porjes.com] 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.

  • ENTIRE SITE ARCHIVE - Bittorrent (Score:5, Informative)

    by eaglebtc ( 303754 ) * on Saturday February 28, 2004 @07:14PM (#8419152)
    For the benefit of posterity, I archived the entire site this morning, including audio and video content. It is now available for you to download as a Bittorrent release, containing a single RAR file. The site was archived using HTTrack 3.3 [httrack.com] and set to crawl to infinitely many levels, excluding external sites. You may unpack to an empty folder and browse it as if you were on the live site.

    Total size is 450MB, compressed down to 130MB using WinRAR 3.3.

    View info and download the torrent here. [torrentz.com]

  • We're not killing the site (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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

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