about this site
webmutant is a site for articles, tips, and how-to guides on web-development issues that matter. It's also my portfolio site, and a showcase for any cool little web-tools and toys I happen to develop. There used to be a weblog here, as well. Let me tell you about that.
I'd been interested in working on websites ever since I was first playing around with Mosaic on the University of Washington's machines. I fell in love with building sites, and it was no wonder -- it was a hobby that combined several of my favorite disciplines: writing, editing, computers, layout and design. Eventually I made it my career. It was a different world then; it feels like a lifetime ago.
By the time I started working on this site in September of 1999, the Internet Boom was rising and rising and it was actually starting to look to a lot of people like it would never stop. There was a genuine cachet to being a web designer in those days. There was talk flying around of six-figure salaries, travel to exotic cities, meetings with high-powered clients.
To a generation of cybergeeks, it was suddenly the next best thing to being James Bond. There was a sense that we were going to change the world, that the Web was going to be everywhere and it was going to be important, and we were going to transform the future into those glittering visions we could see and almost touch in the glossy pages of WIRED.
I had my own little piece of that dream and I wanted to share. I wanted everybody who had the will to become a web designer to have access to the tools, the ideas, and to the lifestyle. I wanted everybody to get to do this really cool thing and I wanted them to know what it was like.
There were a lot of great weblogs out there that were talking about web design, there didn't really seem to be anyone out there talking about what it was like to be a web designer. I decided that was my beat. I was going to cover that angle.
But then it all started to fall apart.
Early 2001 found me working at one of the last of the big dot-coms still standing. We had these weekly all-hands meetings -- pep rallies, really -- where the CEO would talk about how all these other Internet-based companies dying off was a good thing for us, since it eliminated the competition.
I would walk out of these meetings shaking my head, thinking: This is completely insane! This is like the last dinosaur standing alone, looking around at the comet-blasted, barren landscape, crowing, "Wow! All of this is MINE!"
I knew my days there were numbered almost from the beginning. They never really knew what I was supposed to be working on, or whom I was supposed to be working for, so I spent all my time trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing. So eventually they "let me go." I knew they would; I recognized the pattern from previous dot-com jobs.
I stopped blogging about "the lifestyle." I was just another dot-com burnout. But still . . . .
I'm still a webmutant. I wanted to do this all along not just for a paycheck, not just for the thrill of being a web designer, but just because I love building websites. The web is still my home. It's the environment I've grown into, adapted for, evolved to thrive in.
Stick around. We'll see where this ride takes us.
why webmutant?
Back in 1999, when I created this site, I originally wanted to call it webmastery.com — it struck me as a nice play on words, as a name that would convey gaining mastery over the skills a webmaster would need.
Of course, as with most clever ideas I come up with for domain names, someone else had already registered it, but they weren't actually doing anything with the domain — they just have it available for sale. Okay, I thought — I wonder how much they want for it? I sent them e-mail to ask.
I believe the price they quoted me was around $15,000.
I don't know about you, but I don't have $15,000 burning a hole in my pocket, so I decided to pass.
Instead, I thought about what I liked about the sound of the name — the play on "webmaster". It also reminded me of Webmonkey, another site whose name I liked. Okay, I thought — what I want here is web-m-something.
I scrolled through /usr/dict/words to the M's, and jotted down every word that caught my eye that might look good with "web" in front of it on a piece of paper. Then I went back through the list and scratched out the ones I didn't like after all, and left myself with a shortlist of about five candidates.
webmutant leapt out at me from that list — irreverent, fun, techy, iconoclastic. I had my name.
Whole process, start to finish, took maybe twenty minutes, tops. And I didn't have to pay an identity firm over a million dollars to come up with it, either.
