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Interview caught Andrew, the creator of Diaryland - and managed to persuade him to take a break from work...just for a few question's worth. A really obvious question, but an interesting one to all of us: what made you start Diaryland? I wish I had a great answer for that, because people always ask it. Basically, I just had the idea one day in late 1998, and I forget exactly how it came to me (I don't think there was a really direct string of thoughts that led to it really anyway). Once I had it, I could totally imagine the site, and I wanted to have it done so badly, I remember walking down the street totally just imagining how good it'd be if a site like it existed (at the time there were no sites like it. Since then a couple of sites from back then have become more like it, but back then there wasn't anything). I also remember desperately trying to get my boss at the time to program it with the other programmers at that job, since I wasn't much of a programmer at all then. My "Seriously, I'll pay a month of my pay for it!" I think wasn't taken seriously or something, so I had to do a lot of reading and whatnot to learn enough programming to make it. About 8 or 9 months worth actually. At the time I had the idea I read an article in Wired magazine about the guy who started Hotmail, and it described how he couldn't get to sleep after he got the idea because he kept thinking about it, and I remember being like "hey me too!". Of course he sold his company to Microsoft for 600 million dollars and I can't even get Microsoft to send the 50 dollar rebate check they owe me so I can buy some new pants, so the similarities end there. Do you get excited about working with Diaryland, or has it started to feel like a chore? I mostly get excited when I'm adding new features, especially when I can look a few hours later and go "wow, 1000 people already used that!" or whatever, but a lot of it has lost it's excitingness. I had another idea for a site recently that got me pretty excited for a while and I was thinking "wow, this is how I felt about Diaryland years ago", which was sort of odd. Don't get me wrong though, I still love the site, it just obviously isn't as exciting to me as watching the signups come in the first day and reading the first entries, etc. Also the upkeep and work I have to put into it is much more significant now, so it probably feels like more of a chore because it actually is more of a chore. But yeah, don't let me give the wrong impression, I love running the site and everything, I just wish I had a clone who could take care of the bad parts. And then when he was done, we could trade clothes too and confuse people and stuff, it'd be like a wacky movie. What would your response be to those who say that the Diaryland templates are ugly? How important, in your opinion, is the diary's layout? Haha, well, I can't imagine anyone EVER saying that, that would be unheard of! But yeah, I think they're better looking the first 20 times you see them, and I'm sick of them too. I made the current ones in about an hour to replace the previous ones which were getting stale, and I've just finished a big improvement to how templates work inside the Diaryland system that will make needing to complain about templates a thing of the past pretty soon. As for the importance of a layout, personally I don't care that much. It's nice to see something really pretty, but if the writing is boring it's not going to matter. On the other hand, it IS nice to see an original template, and sometimes a particularily striking template will totally get your attention and make you read a diary you may have skimmed over otherwise. When I say striking too, I don't just mean nice, I mean anything that makes you actually really notice it for some reason. The other day I found a diary whose design was made up almost entirely of a big picture of Axl Rose, how could I not read that? There are so many diaries that you can't really read them all, so if you're just surfing around, the design is a nice quick first impression of what the diary might be like, but in the end, it's not that important. I think really a good analogy might be to think of a diary's design as clothing: There are a lot of people out there who dress boringly and blend in together, and a lot who dress very nicely and stand out. You can make some generalizations ("look, a Radiohead shirt, they like Radiohead", "look, a Phish shirt, they're stoned"), but if you just get fixated on looks and judge everyone by them you probably miss out on some people who are badly dressed and spell better than you. But then I look like I'm dressed by hobos, so don't listen to me! 688 Diaryland users list you as a favourite. There are probably still many who might not realise that you actually keep a diary (although 688 is pretty impressive!). How does it make you feel to know that so many people read your diary? It's kind of neat, although it'd be better if half the comments weren't "he runs the place so I guess I have to mention him" haha. But yeah, I don't really think of it much, so I don't really know what to say. It's nice I guess haha, but it's not that massive a number or anything. A lot of people get hung up on how many readers they have, and while it's totally fun for a while, it's nicer to just know that a few people you like read your diary. It's like: if you want pure numbers, just write a letter to even the smallest small-town newspaper, way way more than 688 people will read you. You haven't picked many diaries as favourite. What makes you choose your reading material? How many diaries do you read on a regular basis? I don't read that many, the ones my list are really about the only ones I keep up with. I'm not really sure what my rationale is, since there are other diaries I definitely like as much as some of the ones on there, I should probably put some better thought into that! What do you like doing when not fixing our databases? What other hobbies or interests do you have? Err, sort of a hard question right now since that's about all I do all the time it seems lately, fix things. But yeah, umm, not much, I like playing guitar and I'm addicted to Tetris right now to a kind of disturbing degree, and umm, yeah. I need to come up with good entertaining lies for this question. NOTE TO SELF: Come back to this question and lie like crazy. How many people have now incorporated "bitchtard" in their vocabulary? How does it make you feel to have such a direct effect on people? Ha, I hope not many! If the direct effect I have on people is actually that then I think I should feel pretty crappy. It'd be nice if I made a more profound and lasting effect on people: Like having them incorporate the word "gigglenuts" into their vocabulary. Now THAT is something I could feel proud about. Which wine would you recommend with swallowed bugs? Dude, just don't swallow bugs, they're gross! I really have no good answer to that question, so I'll recount a bug story from today: I went to take a shower, but there was a spider in my bathtub, so I started to run water to wash him down the drain, but then I thought maybe that would kill him and I felt bad so I stopped the water and he started walking around the tub again, so I went to get a box to take him outside in, but then when I got back he was gone and I have no clue where he's hiding. Now of course you're asking what the point of this story is, and well, okay, I don't know either, but if I'm found dead in the next few days, the spider did it. Interviewed by GingerBug
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