Welcome to the New Builder.com.

March 6, 2002 3:31 PM

Welcome to the New Builder.com. Now more useless than ever. (The original web development stuff is here.)
posted by kirkaracha (21 comments total)

It's the redesign only a mother could love.

• All title tags are "Builder.com" for your bookmarking inconvenience
• Meaningless buzzword verbs as navigation (Program, Architect, Manage)
• The Back button is broken due to ads in i-frames
• Dumb URL (builder.com.com)
• Fixed font sizes
• Channels? What year is this?

posted by kirkaracha at 3:32 PM on March 6, 2002

I actually like the direction builder.com is going, becoming more of a codeguru.com,codeproject.com type site, expanding beyond tradition HTML/Javascript hint type site.

However, the implementation of the site is horrible, feels like I'm surfing in molasses. Many links are broken, getting a lot of time out errors, finding a specific article is difficult. Oh well, I stopped going to builder.com over a year ago, the new changes aren't enough to make me go back.
posted by patrickje at 3:46 PM on March 6, 2002

....and a father could beat senseless.
posted by Mach3avelli at 3:46 PM on March 6, 2002

Apparently CNet has owned com.com for years (an empire built on the foresight of purchasing news.com!); I wonder why they're starting to use it now.
posted by dhartung at 3:54 PM on March 6, 2002

Dumb URL (builder.com.com)

Yeah, that sounds utterly stupid too. "Get your web bearings at the new builder dot com dot com"

Ha.
posted by betobeto at 4:00 PM on March 6, 2002

What burns is they own tv.com and don't really do anything with it
posted by owillis at 4:02 PM on March 6, 2002

I didn't know until recently that Cnet owned com.com, too.
posted by waxpancake at 4:24 PM on March 6, 2002

What bugs me about Cnet's new direction for Builder, in addition to the suboptimal redesign, is that it shuts the door on new web developers. Just because a lot of us old-timers have moved on doesn't mean that there isn't a need for good front-end references and tutorials.

I've been doing web development for nearly seven years, so a lot of the information on Builder is old news, but it was very valuable to me when I was learning, and I still occasionally like to use the old site as a reference. It seems like they're trying to do too much with this new direction, and they're trying to establish themselves as an all-in-one development resource when there are already better, more focused sites out there.
posted by kirkaracha at 4:32 PM on March 6, 2002

Come to think of kirkaracha, I agree with you, I had thought that this might be a direction builder.com should take, but most of the time I went to builder it was for specific technique that I was interested (purely HTML/Javascript).

There are much better sites for pure development out there, and builder.com's niche was web development. Not that it was ever that great, but it did show someone how to do something on the web. And it's current interface just completely abandons that.

Oh well, there are still a lot of good sites out there.
posted by patrickje at 4:55 PM on March 6, 2002

I liked builder when I was just getting started, too. Patrickje claims there are "still a lot of good sites out there." Would anyone like to name some of those for me? I'm decidedly underwhelmed with the new builder.com.com myself and would like some more straightforward sites to bookmark for future "what was that thing again that did the stuff?" moments. (:
posted by verso at 5:01 PM on March 6, 2002

Eh, its ok, but it does reflect the times better. Now it's not about having a program that's on the internet, it's about using the internet in your program. That's a different design methodology.

It seems to have moved away from the quick-scripting style that it had (20 Crazy JavaScript tricks, and all that bullshit) into more of an over all software engineering site.

The design is god-awful though.
posted by SweetJesus at 5:05 PM on March 6, 2002

Verso: Try

• The Code Project
• DHTML Lab
• Microsoft Developer Network

Or of course the method I use most of the time, Google. For example, I was interested in a Javascript function to format a field as currency, so I googled for it, and I had the answer. In fact, I think Google by itself makes a lot of the linking sites obsolete, why look for a solution on numerous websites, when I can just google for it?
posted by patrickje at 5:39 PM on March 6, 2002

I learned a lot from the WDVL and webreference.com back in the day. I'm a little surprised that they're still hanging in there, but they are.
posted by rodii at 7:01 PM on March 6, 2002

That was the day I also visited BrowserWatch all the time, in the heyday of the browser wars. It's still happening too, though it looks like the original proprietor is gone.

Cnet is the original home of cheese on the web. Even before they registered news.com, they made it big, uh, repurposing other people's content. When they started up builder.com, browsers.com. download.com, shareware.com, and their host of semi-lookalike brethren, the repackaged cheese just overflowed. I never really understood why people went there.
posted by rodii at 7:08 PM on March 6, 2002

WebMonkey still occasionally has good stuff, I continually get useful information from A List Apart, and the unfortunately-named WebmasterBase has some good articles.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:18 PM on March 6, 2002

evolt & w3schools.com are good resources too.
posted by riffola at 8:04 PM on March 6, 2002

Devshed is really good for your coding pleasure.
posted by geoff. at 9:30 PM on March 6, 2002

try:

• Apple Internet Developer - not too much content, but the font gallery (cross-browser/platform) has been priceless for explaining the murky font-size situation to co-workers and clients
• O'Reilly Javascript and CSS Center
• Digital Web
• not just google, but try groups.google.com - any question you have has most likely been asked and (hopefully) answered in the past
• and I second the vote for Devshed, I learned PHP from their tutorials

posted by panopticon at 11:07 PM on March 6, 2002

Webmonkey was my choice when I had to learn PHP and ASP very fast. They have some good basic tutorials.

Also, for ASP, you can try 4guysfromrolla. They had content ranging from basic to advanced and several helpfull links.
posted by rexgregbr at 3:40 AM on March 7, 2002

ZdNet devhead/developer was very good, and then CNet took it over and made it crap...
posted by wibbler at 11:05 AM on March 7, 2002

It looks a bit like TechRepublic in drag. CNet bought them a while back, and, you guessed it, went downhill quality wise.
posted by helloboys at 1:58 AM on March 8, 2002