Webmonkey

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

~ the goodbye ~

i learned a fair share of my html on sites like this one. webmonkey was the english-language tutorial side of the late-90s self-taught web, the way donanimhaber's hardware threads were the turkish-language side for me. it launched in august 1996 as a spinoff of hotwired, the early consumer brand wired magazine put up on the web in october '94. honestly, the model was simple. somebody at wired wrote a tutorial on how to build a frameset or how to embed a quicktime video. you read it on a 33.6k modem. you tried it. it worked or it did not.

the article that put webmonkey on every web 1.0 reading list was dave thau's javascript tutorial. i was on a 33.6k modem on ttnet around 1998-2000 stitching the same kind of pages together, frames inside frames with animated gifs everywhere. webmonkey was where the english-speaking version of that crowd went to look up the actual syntax. in those days. the side panel had a programming section, a design section, a multimedia section, an e-business section. each one was a long list of tutorials with cartoon icons.

i was not paying attention by the end, but anyway. webmonkey shut down four times. lycos closed it in february '04 when wired digital was sold and the ad money fell out. condé nast acquired wired in 2006 and revived webmonkey by may 2008. between 2008 and 2013 scott gilbertson kept it alive almost alone as writer and editor. the final shutdown came in may 2013 when condé nast stopped producing new content. gilbertson posted a goodbye essay in september of that year, the one where he said it felt like a family dog that had suddenly stopped being there.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually was ~

the structure of a webmonkey tutorial was unusually deliberate. honestly, you got a short intro, a numbered series of code examples with explanatory paragraphs in between. then a "next steps" link pointed to the next tutorial in the same track. the tone was friendly without being a teen-magazine tone, more like a smart older sibling who actually built websites for a living. the cartoon mascot was a stylized monkey, no logos.

to be fair, the editorial team at the peak included people like june cohen and jeffrey veen. jeffrey zeldman wrote there before the web-standards-movement essays. honestly, this was the lineage that became a list apart and the entire designing-with-web-standards arc of the mid-2000s. webmonkey published their first essays before any of that infrastructure existed.

~ how it ended ~

this part you had to be inside the wired digital business to feel, and i was not. the dot-com ad collapse cut the wired digital staff from over 200 people to under 50 by february 2004. webmonkey was one of the casualties of that round. condé nast bought wired's print magazine in 1998 already, the digital arm went separately to lycos in '99, then bounced through terra networks, then back to condé nast in 2006 with wired-the-magazine. by 2013 condé nast had decided the wired domain did not need a separate web-dev tutorial subsite. stack overflow and mdn had eaten the tutorial category in the meantime.

~ what remains ~

webmonkey was the proof that mass-audience web-dev tutorials could carry a brand. mdn picked up the reference role. stack overflow got the question-and-answer role. css-tricks and smashing magazine inherited the editorial-tutorial role that webmonkey originated. dave thau's javascript tutorial still gets cited by people who learned it the first time around. the rest of the archive sits on archive.org now.

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