Comment Re:lol etc. (Score 1) 42
I logged into
Consistent templating and organization (e.g. automatic datestamps on posts, reverse-chron indexes by month, category indexes, etc.) were hard problems for non-programmers and the tools to do them were rudimentary. Blogger's approach was to do all that stuff server-side, generate static pages, and either upload them directly via FTP -- oh, those naive days -- or dump them as a zipfile to be uploaded manually. Pitas / Diaryland just hosted it all centrally. Greymatter offered a complete self-hosted alternative; it predates (and was hugely influential on) Movable Type. It predates b2/cafelog and thus WordPress. (At the time, Perl-CGI was more likely to be offered by a host than PHP.) It was free and open-source. It made self-hosted self-contained blogs a thing. From the WordPress Codex:
"WordPress was primarily inspired by Noah Grey's Greymatter open-source web log and journal software. It is related to b2, sort of a second cousin twice removed."
[ There's a parallel strand with Dave Winer's software, but those tools were always trickier to get working in standard hosting environments. ]
If this is literally the first time you heard about Greymatter you were operating very much out on your own limb. Which is fine. But the transition to blogging from "personal websites" (or if you like, home pages, though that's more 1995-6) was less to do with people who figured out dynamic websites in the mid-90s (which I did, kinda, via 'Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing', but who really had access to AOLServer and Oracle?) and far more about people who just wanted to write stuff and share links on their own sites on their own hosted domains.
The people who chipped in most of the money didn't do it because Wil Wheaton told them. They did it because they were there at the time and believe they owe Noah a twenty-year debt of gratitude. They did it because this guy gave his thing to the world and just faded away and it felt intrusive to ask why. They did it because his circumstances meant he never really made a cent or was able to turn it into a business the way Movable Type's creators did. If Cory Doctorow and Paul Ford and Anil Dash and Peter Merholz and Andy Baio and John Gruber and Jason Shellen and Erica Joy and and many others of that era think his contribution mattered -- as it mattered to me at the time, futzing around -- then it mattered. I know a lot of people for whom blogging was life-changing in the very early 00s and what set them on that path was Greymatter. The biggest regret is that it took this crisis to pay at least some of it back.
(Also, tables were Netscape 1.1 / 1995.)
