Welcome to the All New Webmonkey
It’s been a long, strange trip, but Webmonkey is part of the Wired.com family once again.
Webmonkey has been purchased by CondeNet, the parent company of Wired.com, Reddit and, as of today, ArsTechnica. The team here at Wired.com has given the site a complete redesign. The Compiler blog is once again known by its original name, monkey_bites. We’ll continue to use this space to write about all things web development.
We have also republished the bulk of Webmonkey’s vast library of tutorials and reference guides on a wiki. With very few exceptions, every page in the tutorials, reference and code library sections of the site is publicly editable. We’re using MediaWiki’s open source software to host the content.
Some new things you’ll notice:
* Articles can be tagged and rated.
* Each page has its own backchannel for comments and discussion.
* Registered users get profile pages where they can talk about their projects and list the sites they’ve built.
* We’re still in the beta phase. Webmonkey is, and will continue to be, a constant work in progress. If you run into trouble, check the FAQ or drop us a line. We’ve set up a wiki page for bug tracking, so if you see something that doesn’t quite look right, let us know.
So, why a wiki?
When Webmonkey debuted in 1996, the site was sort of a soapbox for HotWired’s engineers and designers — a place for them to evangelize emerging web standards, rate the newest browsers and demonstrate their bleeding-edge code hacks. Those engineers also produced stacks and stacks of tutorials on all aspects of building for the web.
But as we were going through Webmonkey’s decade-long library, we realized much of the content left on this site was out of date or, worse, irrelevant. Web technologies change extremely quickly. Specs come and go, some standards recommendations get picked up by some browsers and ignored by others.
Faced with the prospect of going back into the archives to continuously update and rewrite the older articles, we decided to turn Webmonkey into a collaborative project. It was an easy decision.
Who better to help keep the content accurate and relevant than the people who know this stuff best: the programmers, designers and developers themselves?
So we ported over the articles that made the most sense to keep around (we left behind the CyberStudio tutorials). We polished up some of the old favorites from the library, like Thau’s JavaScript Tutorial and the Site Optimization Tutorial. But that’s not to say the content on the site is perfect. There’s still plenty of work to be done.
However, if there’s something that’s been bugging you about your favorite tutorial, you now have the opportunity to fix it and make it better for everyone. Better yet, if there’s something you think belongs on Webmonkey, you can start a new tutorial. You can also request that somebody else write about the topic using our suggestion box.
Our primary goal here is to let the community dictate the direction of the site. By opening Webmonkey up to collaboration, we can ensure that Webmonkey is a place where you can always come to learn about the things that interest you.
We’re still writing like crazy, and we have dozens of new tutorials about current stuff like OpenID, Microformats, Drupal and Python to debut over the coming weeks and months.
Webmonkey has always been a valuable resource for anyone who wants to learn how to code for the web. Now that we’re back, we hope to keep that tradition alive.
We welcome your comments, your suggestions and, most of all, your wisdom.
