Thanks Webmonkey

Around 2000, there weren’t that many “tutorial websites” out there for web development. The tutorials available were hard to follow or not that well-written. All but the ones on Webmonkey.

I had to search for hours for a good tutorial on anything related to web development, before great learning resource sites like Codecademy, Smashing Magazine or MDN were available.

Considering I didn’t have an internet connection at home, and internet cafés were pretty expensive at the time, this was less than ideal. When I did get a dial-up connection at home, the prices were still terrible.

But looking around, one of the websites especially stood out. That was Webmonkey.

I found it through Tripod.com, a free ad-supported web hosting service by Lycos that was popular then. Tripod.com gave you a whole 20 MBs of storage space, and a *.tripod.com subdomain, for free!

Lycos also owned Webmonkey, so naturally they were pointing future “webmasters” to it.

It was one of the few who had well-structured tutorials, with learning plans, containing everything from graphic design to JavaScript or SEO. It even had an “E-Business” category with stuff related to marketing or analytics.

Dave Thau, or just Thau! as he was known on Webmonkey, wrote some of the best articles. His Advanced JavaScript Tutorial became pretty popular, and had stuff like cookies, timers or image preloading. It was awesome.

His tutorials are the ones that initially got me into JavaScript, and helped me understand how it worked with the DOM and everything else.

The articles were so great I was downloading them onto floppy disks at cafés, to take home and read again. I had created my own personal “MDN”, that I could reference anytime I couldn’t remember a tag or a JavaScript method.

There were also lots of articles on other things like browser sniffing, frames, or XSS, which influenced how we did web development for years.

Lycos shut down Webmonkey formally in 2004, but it’s still online today in a basic news format.

For all the nights I stayed up reading your tutorials, wanting to learn more because it was so much fun, I just wanted to say thank you!