What is a Webmonkey?
July 16, 2001
Hi! According to the Free On-Line Dictionary Of Computing (FOLDOC.doc.ic.ac.uk) a webmonkey is defined as:
webmonkey
[World-Wide Web] A largely unskilled Web worker— one with a passable understanding of HTML but little else. It is often supposed that, in the New Media food chain, there is nothing lower than a webmonkey. Alas, there is: people who barely have the skills to use FrontPage; these people are called "typists".
That's a fairly accurate description of my current skill level. I've been working at learning this webpage stuff for a year or so; and although I did take off about 6 months to do other things, I had expected to be much further along by now. There is so much to learn! I'd like to be able to refer to myself as a "webmaster" but that sounds so pretentious. Right now I know just enough to lay out only the simplest of pages and I still wonder how everyone else makes those fancy graphics.
Sometimes I have illusions of grandeur and imagine myself actually being good at this:
actor/singer/waiter/webmaster
[World-Wide Web] An elaboration of the ages-old concept of the actor/singer/waiter, the actor/singer/waiter/webmaster is someone who waits tables /for now/, but who has aspirations of breaking into the glamorous worlds of acting or New Media or both! He keeps going to auditions and sending resumes to C|Net — because you have to pay your dues. His credits include being on "Friends" (as an extra), in "ER" (actually, in an ER — he twisted his ankle once; but he counts the x-rays as screen credits), and having been the webmaster of an extensive multimedia interactive Web site (his hotlist of "Simpsons" links). (1998-04-04)
Other times I think maybe this will never be more than a hobby. Oh well, I'll keep at it and we'll see. At least I'm not as bad as Bobo the Webmonkey (I hope!):
Bobo the Webmonkey
[World-Wide Web] What B1FF was to BITNET users, Bobo the Webmonkey is to webmonkeys— the mythical prototype of incompetent web designers everywhere. In fact, Bobo may be what B1FF became when he grew up. Bobo knows about HTML only what he has learned from viewing the source of other people's Web pages. Bobo doesn't know what a MIME type is, even though someone gave him a hardcopy of the FOLDOC entry for it. Bobo may have used an HTML code validator [http://validator.w3.org/] before, but isn't sure. Bobo doesn't know what the difference between GIF and JPEG is. He thinks PNG is a foreign country. All the pages Bobo has designed say "Welcome to [organisation] online!" at the top, and say "click here!" at least three times per page. Bobo has used Photoshop before; he doesn't understand why people keep asking if he's ever been tested for color-blindness. Bobo never got that "its/it's" distinction real clear, as you can tell from his pages. Bobo likes [BLINK]. (1998-04-04)
Well, that's about it for now. Thanks for checking in; and, ya'll come back now, ya heuh?
More Simian Allusions
Sysape
One-Banana Problem
Scratch Monkey
Monkey Up
Infinite-Monkey Theorem
RFC2795: The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite
