The twitter-verse (as it’s sometimes called) was buzzing around one particular presentation at An Event Apart conference on Tuesday. Author and Webmonkey, Hotwired, Adaptive Path and Google veteran Jeff Veen’s Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps was supposedly stunning — even to the point of bringing tears to one’s eyes.

Veen’s presentation is now online for your viewing pleasure. Don’t grab the kleenex yet. You can derive loosely what Veen was saying in the presentation, but his visual presentation style stays true — there’s hardly any text and no presentation notes. I doubt these out of context slides will start waterworks, but they’ll entice you to want to see the man in action.

For those who went, the slides are a memento of what was said to be an inspiring way to visualize how to present a story through data.

For those who weren’t in attendance, I recommend slides 24 to 35, which present a way to go from a data dump of raw rainfall numbers to an overlaid map which tells exactly what the data means in one glance.

If you want to hear the presentation in context, Veen’s next public appearance is Monday, September 8th at the Society for News Design (SND) conference in Las Vegas.

Until then, check out this snippet from Veen’s presentation on data overload from June’s An Event Apart in New Orleans:

Jeff Veen on data overload from Jeffrey Zeldman on Vimeo.

The tweets from and after Tuesday’s An Event Apart presentation suggested people were practically falling over themselves applauding Veen and resulting in calls for phone book readings, a presidential campaign, plenty of hyperbolic praise and even a marriage proposal.

Wow, color us impressed. We’re sorry we missed it, but way to go, Webmonkey!

WordPress celebrated its five year anniversary since its first (0.7) release a couple of times Wednesday. The main event was at a club in San Francisco later in the evening. The earlier event was a gathering of bloggers at Yahoo Brickhouse, which just so happens to be in very close proximity to Webmonkey’s office. Pizza and beer were shared by all. Much networking was to be had and we were there to take a few snapshots.

WordPress’ founding developer Matt Mullenweg chats with party-goers.

David Recordon pumps the keg. Pizza and beer. Yum.

The hustle and bustle — a pretty good show of people.

Anyone who attended the Webmonkey Relaunch party in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago noticed how pleased we were. Not only were we happy to see your smiling faces and meet all of you in person, but we were downright giddy that our website has been reborn in such a grand fashion. So pleased, in fact, that we decided a second party on the east coast was in order. To that end, we’re hosting a little get-together in the Big Apple this week. That’s right, the Webmonkeys will be in New York City!

Come join us on Wednesday, June 11 from 6:00PM until 8:00PM at Sweet & Vicious in Manhattan.

Webmonkey Relaunch Bash

Sweet & Vicious

5 Spring St.

New York City, New York 10012

We’ll have shirts, hats and stickers to give away to the early birds. We’ll also have music, beverages and good cheer for everyone. Yes, that means there will be an open bar — sorry kids, it’s 21 and up only. Staffers from Webmonkey and Wired.com will be in attendance, so join us as we raise a glass to the monkey, dream up new OEmbed implementations and share our favorite web designer cocktail party jokes. (Did you hear the one about the guy with the broken wireframe?)

We’ve set up an event listing on Upcoming, so go there if you need details, maps, directions or if you want to invite others. Also, follow Webmonkey on Twitter for further news and updates.

See you there!

We’ll be giving away delicious cups of Philz on a first come, first served basis. And we’ll only be hanging out at the 4th Street Philz location, so come down on your way to work, before the morning meeting or after that all-nighter you just pulled. We’ll also have some stickers and other swag for the taking.

Coffee not your thing? Don’t forget about the Webmonkey relaunch party tomorrow evening at Gallery Lounge just up the street.

Webmonkey is alive and kicking once again, and in celebration of the site’s long-overdue rebirth, we’re throwing a little party in its honor. Come join us on Thursday May 29th from 6:30 until 8:30PM at The Gallery Lounge in San Francisco’s SOMA district.

We’ll have shirts, hats and stickers to give away to the early birds. We’ll also have music, beverages and good cheer for everyone. Yes, that means there will be an open bar. The Webmonkey staff will be in attendance, and we’re counting on a few ex-monkeys from back in the day to make their way out of the woodwork as well. Join us as we raise a glass to the monkey, debate the merits of HTML 5 and maybe even do some impressions of our favorite primates.

RSVP to the event on Upcoming.

Also, subscribe to the monkey_bites blog and follow us on Twitter for further news and updates.

Webmonkey Relaunch Bash

Thursday, May 29

6:30-8:30PM

The Gallery Lounge

510 Brannan Street

San Francisco, CA 94107

(415) 227-0449

(Get directions)

See you there!

Photo: TCM Hitchhiker via Flickr

Here are the stickers:

And the hats:

A close up of the embroidery:

A bit more subtle than the old Webmonkey beanies from the 1990s, but just as warm. We also have baseball hats with the new monkey logo and, soon, T-shirts. We’ll be handing out some of this swag at the Webmonkey launch party, which will happen some time next week in San Francisco. Watch for the announcement on Upcoming. Also, we’ll be doing some sticker drops at coffee shops around San Francisco in the next week or so — follow Webmonkey on Twitter to find out where and when.

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.

Last week’s Webmonkey article “Simple JavaScript Debugging” by Chris Klimas covered the basics of troubleshooting your client-side scripts. Chris showed us how to use very simple alert techniques and how to run JavaScript consoles in various browsers.

This week, Webmonkey has Part Two of Chris’ JavaScript debugging tutorial. It focuses on Venkman, Mozilla’s open source, cross-platform debugging tool. Klimas gives us step-by-step instructions on how to install and use the program, then offers some advice and helpful tips.

So have a look at “Debugging with Venkman” over on Webmonkey. Keep in mind that this two-part tutorial is meant for beginner to advanced JavaScript programmers. So, if you’re totally new to JavaScript, you may want to start by reading Thau’s handy “JavaScript Tutorial” first.

Remember to send us your feedback and let us know what you think!

Let’s all welcome back Mike Calore, who returns tomorrow from snorkeling in the Alps or whatever he was doing that necessitated a blogging break. I can’t imagine what could be more fun than biting monkeys all day, but to each his own. I hope my filling-in has been adequate, but I’m sure everybody’s happy to return to the familiar, soothing tones of our regular host.

(Image created with CoolText)