Builder.com

» see builder.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Builder.com was never a site I read on purpose, it was a site I arrived at. You had a problem with a frameset or a regular expression, you typed the problem into a search box, and a CNET page came back with the answer three paragraphs down. That was most of what the English-language tutorial web was for anyone learning outside its home country. You did not follow it, you hit it.

CNET launched it in 1997, a year after Wired put up Webmonkey, and aimed at exactly the same reader. The 1998 front page splits into four sections that tell you what the job was then: Authoring, Programming, Graphics, Servers. Next to those sat a forum called Builder Buzz and a link for the CNET Builder.com Live conference. The tone was less playful than Webmonkey's and more like a trade publication that had noticed the trade was now everybody.

The headlines on that same December 1998 page are a core sample of the era. Dreamweaver 2.0 against FrontPage 2000. Twenty ways to use Photoshop 5.0 for web graphics. A column arguing that AOL buying Netscape signaled the end of an era, which was correct, and which nobody at CNET could have known applied to their own category too.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the byline era ~

What dates Builder.com hardest is that the columns had names. Dan Shafer wrote Master Builder. Rex Baldazo wrote RexTech. There was a SuperScripter column on Java and JavaScript and a wide-angle one called The Big Picture. Charity Kahn and Fredric Paul were on the masthead early. This was personality-led technical writing published by a company with an ad sales team, three or four years before anyone would have called it blogging.

It was also a live event. CNET Builder.com Live ran as a conference where product launches got announced, which put the site in the odd position of covering releases that debuted at its own show.

~ the redirect ~

CNET moved its properties onto a scheme where every site got a second dot-com bolted on, so from 2002 the real address was builder.com.com and the plain domain just bounced you there. CNET had bought TechRepublic in 2001 for twenty-three million dollars, and over the following years the two developer titles converged: shared templates, shared image paths, articles tagged Builder.com sitting inside a TechRepublic layout.

The last homepage the Internet Archive holds under the Builder.com name was captured on 3 July 2007. The lead items are a VB.NET tip about Regex.Replace and a SQL Server piece on reconciling charges against payments, which is a long way from twenty ways to use Photoshop. The capture on 7 July is a 301 to techrepublic.com.com, and it never came back. There was no announcement, no goodbye column from Dan Shafer, no closing note. A redirect went live over a holiday weekend and that was the whole ceremony.

~ what a tutorial site was for ~

Builder.com and Webmonkey were built on an assumption that lasted about ten years: that an editor should decide which twelve things a web developer needed explained this month, and that people would pay attention in that order. Stack Overflow launched a year after Builder.com went dark and replaced the premise entirely, answering only the question you actually had. Webmonkey limped on until 2013. Neither of them lost to a better tutorial site.

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