Goodbye Webmonkey, by Jeffrey Veen

Goodbye Webmonkey

Years ago, back in the heydays of HotWired.com, June Cohen stopped by my desk to show me the project she was working on. June was a producer then -- developing new content ideas for the site, pitching them, building them. She eventually rose to be executive producer of all of Wired Digital. But at this point, she was getting ready to start working something new.

Her idea was a good one: She wanted to mine the accumulated knowledge of the HotWired staff for Web development and design tips and tutorials. This was in 1996, I think, and there still wasn't a lot of quality content on the Web that taught people how to make Web stuff. We had figured out quite a bit at HotWired by then, and she thought it only made sense to share it.

"It's going to be called 'WebMonkey'!" she told me.

"That's a stupid name."

"Oh, come on. It's like greasemonkey. We're mechanics for the Web, after all."

"Whatever. Fine. It's a good idea though. What's gunna be in it?"

"We're going to start with weekly columns," she explained. "We've got one on scripting, one on plugins, a question and answer feature, and a column on browser developments."

"Browsers?" My interest was piqued further. I had just started a stint on the W3C's HTML/CSS working group and had been meeting with both Microsoft and Netscape, looking at their next generation browsers. "Awesome -- who's writing that one?"

"Um... you?" She showed me a prototype, just a quick mockup in Photoshop. It was a column of greeked text with my photo at the top.

"Really? And when does this start?"

"Can you get me 800 words by tomorrow?"

And thus I started my tenure as columnist for Webmonkey. Over the years, I wrote hundreds of columns, branching out almost immediate from just writing about browsers to covering the broader topics of Web design and eventually usability and user experience. The rigor of writing weekly forced me to develop and record ideas in a way I'd never known. And the exposure I got from those ideas led to speaking engagements and the book HotWired Style.

Webmonkey also gave me a chance to experiment with what a Web site could do, and how they could be produced. About 18 months after its launch, I helped the Webmonkey team with a complete redesign of the site, moving from a daily column format to a repository of reference material. That work was significant in that it represented the first time I'd dove into dynamic publishing. We stripped the presentation out of the content and ran it through templates, cutting the amount of production effort required to publish the site down to an almost trivial push of a button. That was seven years ago -- a remarkable time to be working on the Web.

Later, Lycos acquired Wired Digital, and scoffed at the amount of effort we put into Webmonkey. We had a dozen people working on a property that did just barely a million pageviews a month. The decision makers at Lycos were more interested in disposable content they could license cheaply and cram down the throats of users who they considered "sticky eyeballs." We fought them, and refered to them as our "evil overlords" and "those bastards from Waltham," but inevitably it was for naught. One by one the Webmonkeys -- actually all of HotWired's talent -- walked out of the neon green doorway for the last time. A skeleton crew worked under the radar for a few more years, lovingly maintaining the site.

I was in San Diego last week at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference when the news came tearing through the IRC channels that Lycos had pulled the plug. Everyone was fired, and Webmonkey was no more.

I don't know what that means for the archives; I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Lycos take the whole thing offline. But there are enough of us with a copy of the tarball to ensure the Monkey will spring up somewhere if that happens.

Even though the site has been slowly fading away for the last few years, it's still tough it see it go. It's a little like returning to my old high nschool campus to find it shuttered and overgrown with weeds -- an important part of who I became reduced to a cell in a spreadsheet, showing a loss that's a little too big this quarter.

This entry was written by Jeffrey Veen and posted 27 February 2004 at 11:53 AM. It was filed under Personal. | View blog reactions

Comments

1. On 27 February 2004 at 12:30 PM Leonieke wrote:

Really sad to see ppl/evil overlords decide to close a service like webmonkey.

I learned my first html through webmonkey, and I'll never forget the excellent explanation of tables and how they correspond to family picnics!

2. On 27 February 2004 at 12:58 PM Max Glenister wrote:

it's really sad to hear that.. all i can add is that over the past four years, if it wasn't for webmonkey, i wouldnt know what i know of HTML and CSS now.

webmonkey the site that started it all for me, a kid wanting to make something online, i'm 17 now (although considered by some as still a "kid"), i have my own domain (right now, in a slight hiatus) - and webcoding is something which, in as much of my free time as possible, i do.

from myself, and many other people (i'm sure)

thankyou.

3. On 27 February 2004 at 1:09 PM Laurie Landry wrote:

I just wonder, can Webmonkey be resurrected elsewhere, or is that all Lycos' intellectual property?

4. On 27 February 2004 at 3:12 PM daniel stoddart wrote:

If Webmonkey truly has gone the way of all flesh, then how do I explain this:

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/04/10/index1a.html

5. On 28 February 2004 at 5:04 AM Adam Bramwell wrote:

Thanks for sharing your story, Jeffrey. You are lucky to have been involved in such a great project!

6. On 28 February 2004 at 10:03 AM Frazier wrote:

Jeff - when I read the news I really felt for you. 1996 was such a fantastic time. @tlas was still around and making my jaw drop on a regular basis. I remember well Webmonkey's first weeks and wondering if making a career of web development was really much of a possibility. I don't know how many times I quoted you and your manifestos about moving towards content separated from layout to clients. Most of them got it too.

You were a big part of something very good. The comments on your blog are testimony to that. Thanks.

7. On 28 February 2004 at 7:53 PM jim wrote:

I have fond memories of webmonkey too, you guys were like a light in the dark in those days - when learning resources were not as common as they are now. I think a few team members should keep webmonkey alive in a new (non-lycos) format.

8. On 29 February 2004 at 5:14 AM Rob wrote:

RIP Webmonkey. I knew you well. Thanks for all the help.

Re: the previous post. Yes, good idea. Perhaps Webmonkey could be kept going as some kind of collaborative blog? Or not a blog, but there's enough talent out there to write concisely about web building.

Shift.com continues, though Shift magazine folded.

9. On 1 March 2004 at 5:46 AM Gordon wrote:

*sniff*

I remember discovering Webmonkey - with a picture of this surfer dude looking guy at the top of the article, who could that've been I wonder.

It got me through my first website in 1998, and I used it heavily for the next couple of years. I still check it on and off to see what the guys are up to, and recently it's gotten through a first mySQL/PHP database.

I'm sure that, even if the content gets locked away, that the spirit of the Webmonkey will live on through yourself and the other 'monkeys'.

10. On 1 March 2004 at 1:53 PM Jono wrote:

Webmonkey has had a profound effect on me (not just my web stuff) and a large proportion of the web. When I found ALA I never even twigged that zeldman was the same guy. good work.

11. On 1 March 2004 at 1:55 PM Jono wrote:

whoops. wrong guy. sorry :) its been a long day.

12. On 2 March 2004 at 5:33 AM Michiel Ebberink wrote:

I also learned from webmonkey and still dis. Where should i go now?

13. On 2 March 2004 at 5:40 AM Michiel E. wrote:

and still DID.

14. On 7 March 2004 at 7:06 PM Scott Partee wrote:

I distinctly remember reading your columns back when I was "figuring it all out." Specifically, I couldn't have gotten through late 1996-all of 1997 w/o Webmonkey and your columns. I even remember turning a few people on to CSS-based design based strictly on reading about it on Webmonkey. Those same people are now gurus (although I have not kept up with the craft).

So thanks for all that!

15. On 8 March 2004 at 8:08 AM Anthony Bosio wrote:

Webmonkey was the first and usually only resource I went to for learning. I got my first web job based on my self-taught web skillz that came exclusively from Webmonkey.

16. On 8 March 2004 at 7:10 PM Preston Jones wrote:

Viva La Web Monkey!!!
It was my major resource when I started getting into web development.

17. On 9 March 2004 at 6:01 AM Kristopher Leslie wrote:

Hi Jeffrey, I am one of your followers and I just recently got your books and Im already plunged into reading each one over and over. Id like to say I wish more schools would teach or require the reading of your books because I until late last year (when I started checking you out for the first time) was making designs that I didnt have "heart" for. I felt all I learned in these 6 years was nothing but you have given me a new outlook on desiging web sites.

However I feel that closing webmonkey is so trivial. They should have had more sense than to close one of the grandaddies of web! I to have spent countless hours reading and understanding how the philosiphies could be implemented into my sites. Well there goes the loot. I hope something better comes out of this because it serves no purpose to be full of gloom maybe something anew will emerge!(?)

18. On 9 March 2004 at 11:43 AM Josh Giese wrote:

I was sad to hear that webmoney was being taken offline. Like many of the stories already posted, I started making webpages in the mid 90's I really didnt have a solid clue of what I was doing until I came across webmonkey.

Here I am today sitting in my office, where I work as a web developer for a large company.

Thank you Jeff, and thanks to everyone who wrote those articles and tutorials. They helped mold my life.

--Josh

19. On 11 March 2004 at 9:26 PM Mike P wrote:

Thanks Jeffrey for all the quality content you and the Webmonkey team have given us over the years. Innumerable designers and developers have benefited immeasurably. Thank you!

20. On 15 March 2004 at 3:06 PM Kris wrote:

My career as well started out with webmonkey tutorials. Heck, I think I even got the word 'tutorial' from there. I cannot remember ever using the word before that.

21. On 20 April 2004 at 8:10 AM Amanda wrote:

i will miss webmonkey.

i mean how else does a girl with a BS in Econ become a Sr Web Developer and Webmistress in 4 years after graduating from school?

thanks for everything.

it is a sad sad day.

22. On 18 July 2004 at 4:59 AM Ben Kioko wrote:

Sad to read about the demise of webmonkey. I literally begun my web development career with the monkey - html, asp, mysql, php etc. Wonder where I'd be without it.
Brilliant idea.