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The
Gift of Grey
An interview with
Noah Grey, the Genius Behind Greymatter
Conducted via email by John S. Rhodes
(31-July-2001)
The Greymatter Story
What is
Greymatter? What does it do? Who is it for?
It's basically a
tool for creating sites in a weblog/journal type of format - distinguished
mainly from other services in that Greymatter is an open source program that
runs entirely on your own server, as well as featuring a much greater degree
of flexibility and customization. It's also fairly more advanced; from
the outset, it's always been intended for the total "control
freaks", like myself, who want as much control as they can get over
every aspect of their site, and who are reasonably comfortable modifying
HTML and tweaking things down to the last detail. (Those who just want
to get a weblog/journal site up and running with as little fuss as
possible will probably be much happier with something like Blogger or
LiveJournal.)
I remember reading on your site that creating Greymatter almost put you
in the hospital. Could you tell us more? What is the inside story?
Well, the simplest
answer is that I pushed myself too hard. But, in a nutshell: I had
created a very popular site for male survivors of sexual abuse (of which I'm
one) that, during the three years I kept it going, had become the most
intense, involving and important part of my life. For reasons too
personal to detail here, that site came to an end in the most painful and
bitter way possible. I felt betrayed and abandoned, I was receiving
death threats, life felt utterly meaningless for awhile and I was suicidal
... and somehow, in the midst of all that, I started tinkering with writing
a program. I'd never truly considered myself a programmer (though I'd
done some custom programming work for that site), and didn't start out
writing something thinking it was going to be anything big ... I thought of
doing a kind of super-guestbook program. I really didn't have any
focus for it at all, it was, at the time, just to give myself something to
*do* - to give myself a distraction, a release.
The more I needed
that release, the harder I kept working on it, as it mutated into a little
weblog/journal program. After about a month or so of nonstop work, I
got it into a usable enough form that I decided to try doing a weblog of my
own again, using this strange beast. At some point, I sent it to a
dear friend to let him try it out just for the hell of it - I'd written this
thing entirely for myself, and never seriously imagined anyone else would
care to use it. But he gave me the encouragement to make it public,
and so I did (again, really, just for the hell of it) - and I was extremely
surprised to see it start taking off like it had. Even some of the
people whose sites I'd read for years (and who I didn't think would ever
give me the time of day) were trying it out. And this was entirely
from word-of-mouth; I've still never taken out a single ad for it or
'promoted' it anywhere other than my own site.
So when all these
people started picking up on it, using it, praising it - it felt
tremendously validating. Greymatter was, after all, merely the end
result of a desperate need for emotional distraction, a product I'd never
intended for anyone else to use, created in a field I *still* don't consider
myself in any way a "professional" at - programming - and never
felt any particular calling for ... that anyone else at all would give a
damn about it was completely unexpected, and completely reaffirming to me at
a time when I needed it perhaps more than ever. So I kept working on
Greymatter, improving it ... but at some point it became less and less about
trying to make *myself* happy, and more and more about making everyone else
happy. I wanted so hard to please that I'd stay up all night if I had
to, just to throw in this or that little feature someone asked me to
include. I just kept doing it, without any sense of *why* I was still
doing it.
In the end, I had
a nervous breakdown towards finishing up the last version earlier this year
- and really came close to losing it completely. (It wasn't
entirely because of Greymatter, although I'd pushed myself much harder on
that than on anything else I've ever done in my life - a number of personal
issues were rearing their ugly heads at the same time, which of course
caused me to push myself yet harder with Greymatter, as a way of forgetting
about everything else.) By the time it was done, I literally couldn't
even look at program code without feeling nauseous to the core - I'd burned
myself out on it just about as thoroughly as anyone can burn themselves out
on anything this side of bedlam. It's only now, several months later,
that I'm able to handle code again at all, and take small steps back towards
a level of comfort with it. But Greymatter was still secondary
to the main problem: from the time my site came down in flames, and the
mountain of unresolved crap that arose in the wake of that, *I never
stopped* - I kept pushing it aside, I just kept going and going, I never
slowed down for too long and just let go. That was, in large measure,
why I stopped doing my weblog in early March, and haven't really done
anything new on the web until now - I needed a lot of time to unwind,
to settle my spirit back down into a place where I really felt I could
breathe again. I'm much closer to that place now, but I'm still in the
process of getting there - I still have a long way to go.
What tools did you use to build Greymatter? How long did it take to
write? What was your vision for it?
No tools other
than my good ol' text editor - every line was written "by hand",
for better or worse. The rest is pretty much answered above - I never
had a true "vision" for it, it started as something small &
unfocused and kept mutating from there.
I think that Greymatter is easy to install and use. Many other people
feel the same way. How did you make this happen? So much software is hard to
use. People want to know your usability secrets.
Heh, well, a lot
of people *don't* think it's very easy to use at all. I think it's
easy once you get it set up the way you want it, but getting it there is
harder than it should be - the setup process could be made much more
user-friendly, and the template system should be radically streamlined.
Greymatter was, again, something I'd created just for myself - although
significant changes were later made to it with user-friendliness in mind, it
wasn't written from the ground-up to be user-friendly, and unfortunately I
think it shows. A large part of it, too, is that most of the people
who try Greymatter come to it from services like Blogger or LiveJournal
where they're used to having a site ready to go for them with the push of a
few buttons.
So, while I don't
think it's *that* difficult to use, it's clearly not for everybody and never
was intended to be. If anything, considering how rooted it is in being
a product written only for my own needs, I'm grateful to anyone that *does*
find it truly easy to use. =)
What do you like about most about Greymatter? What changes would you
make? Are you going to build a commercial version? I know several people
that are curious.
I like that it
still does most of what I want/need it to do - and that I can "open the
hood" and tinker around with it to my heart's content for anything
else. (That's a big reason why I could probably never use any other
closed-source service - even if it did 99% of what I wanted it to do, I'd
still want to be able to tweak that 1%.) But mostly, I simply love it
when it makes people happy - when someone appreciates it enough to write me
a kind letter or donate something to me off my wishlist, that truly ...
helps - redeem some things for a little while.
I haven't decided
yet if I'm going to do a commercial version (although if I *do* make another
program, it will indeed be a commercial product). I have a notebook
crammed full of literally hundreds of ideas and concepts for it, great and
small - there's so much that I'd like to do with it that I know I'll
probably go crazy unless *something* comes of all that. If I did, I
wouldn't make any changes to the existing code, but would begin writing a
completely new program from scratch, driven by a definite and very big focus
from the ground-up. I *know* I could make a MUCH better product, and
part of the reason I'd want to try is simply for the sheer sake of making
the best program I can. I don't know when or if I'll ever find the
spirit to face that again - and it'd *have* to be driven by that, I'd *have*
to be able to do it for myself first and last before any other concerns,
financial or otherwise - but that better creation is in me somewhere.
The Greymatter community is awesome. For example, everyone in the support
forum is very helpful, courteous, and kind. I think it is a reflection of
your generosity, and I think it is a reflection of your great software. What
is your take on the Greymatter community? How do you feel about it?
Heh... what can I
say? They're all absolutely incredible, and I wouldn't know how to
begin to express my gratitude for them. It really blows my mind
sometimes, to go to the forum and see people taking a little time out of
their lives to help each other with that silly thing I created - my brain
has a hard time wrapping itself around that, it's very hard to see that
that's *me*, that's *my* program they're taking the time and effort for. I'm
just blown away by that, by them, and I can't find the words to thank them
enough.
Weblogs
What is the
future of weblogging? What do you expect?
I expect it'll
more-or-less follow the same wide-ranging, ever-changing path as the web
itself, since it's a medium whose nature is so uniquely suited for, and tied
to, the web. Which is to say, it'll go in every direction it can, and
then some; you can't be more out-of-sync with the web than to see it, the
people who comprise it, or any part of it, as a single monolithic entity.
You just can't say "it'll be this", "it won't be that" -
it will be this *and* that, and a thousand more things besides, all at the
same time, and always changing - just like all of us that do it and live
it.
What makes a good weblog? What are the characteristics of a good
weblogger?
The same things
that make for a good work of art in any other creative medium. (And it
*is* an artistic medium, no less inherently capable of the soul's expression
as writing a novel or composing a song.) I want the same thing out of
a good website that I do out of a good book, movie, album, program - to be
entertained, informed, amused, affected, rebuked, reaffirmed, pushed down,
lifted up, impressed, inspired. (Not necessarily all at once. ;)
Doing a great job in any one of those departments is a good and rare enough
gift, though the very greatest and rarest of them, in weblogs or any other
medium, do them all.)
Getting to Know Noah Grey
Who are you?
What are your interests? What is your past? What is your present? What is
your future?
Hoo boy...
;) I don't think I can give any decent answer to that in a paragraph
or two. I'm just a quiet, restless loner-type who's kinda frightened
of the whole damn world ... nothing special. I spend almost all my
time in my room (I'm a manic-depressive agoraphobic), curling up with a good
book or movie, or better yet just with Thomas (my teddy bear) for a few
hours, trying in some quiet stumbling way to get back to a place inside
myself where everything is alright again.
There's far more
than anyone would ever care to know or learn about me on my
old homepage, though. Whatever it says there that "gets it
right", that reduces it into words as best I'll ever be able to do,
still applies.
I know that you are a photographer. Could you tell us more about it?
Similarly, what are some of your other projects?
I've always loved
photography, but late last year (not long after starting Greymatter, the
closing of my male abuse survivors' site, etc.) it started becoming a true
passion - I felt I was finally starting to find a Real voice in it, and
right now perhaps the only one I feel I have left. I'm currently
posting my work on my photolog, Depth
of Field - and if anything, it feels more 'naked' and vulnerable, but
also more true and direct, than doing a biolog (an alternate term I coined
which I'm glad to say has seen widespread use now) did. My photographs
are more to me than just photos - each one is a page from the ongoing Story
- my story.
I don't have
anything else I'm currently working on. A few plans and ideas for
sometime down the road, but I'm not ready to talk about those yet. =)
What gives you inspiration? Who gives you inspiration?
Creatively, no one
in particular comes to mind - I try very hard to avoid looking at some
artist (in any medium) and thinking "I want to be him/her" -
although really, any work that's moved me in any way, in any medium, is
inspiration to me to keep trying to make something from the raw clay of the
lifeforce. If I have one supreme role model, though, it's Leonardo da
Vinci - I've always been in unending love with the passionate, searching,
restless nature of his soul. He could not be contained, and
strived to the utmost of his abilities to encompass within himself
everything he knew and saw and felt in the world around him, to make it all
anew, to make everything within his part of the lifeforce his own - and
that's the level my soul is always yearning to reach.
My family, and the
good friends that I've been incredibly blessed to make through the web, give
me the greatest inspiration of all - the inspiration to just keep living,
the reaffirmation that this planet, this lifetime, is still something worth
being a part of. That's an inspiration I've needed too often, and have
been ridiculously blessed in the people that have been able to give it to
me.
Editor's Comments
(1) Noah Grey is a
genius. (2) I love Greymatter.
(3) Take a walk and enjoy your life.
-- John S.
Rhodes
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