[estacado]

I tried blogging once, but what put me off was the amount work and time it took to make it look good. You've got to format it so that it's readable to persons other than yourself. You need to provide links to relevant/related sites (which sometimes you have search for it because you didn't bookmark it, which you didn't think you needed to because you didn't know you were going to use it in your blog). Embedding stuff is such a pain in my experience. If it's a video, you got to get the size right, the default is always either too big or too small. And I have yet to find a hassle-free way to embed code, especially from the free blogging sites. With images, you need to resize them so that there's a small one inside the post itself, which links to the bigger one when clicked. All that time spent on making it look good is better used to actually do my work, in my opinion.

[eric-hu]

Good aesthetics has been on my mind too. I started one on a Wordpress site and after a few posts, my interest fizzled because I wanted to make better looking posts. When I spend all day trying to make some pages look good at work, I don't really want to do the same thing at home.

I've been trying to think of ways around this, and one might just be to embrace minimalism more. Keep it simple so as to keep creating content. That is what's of value, right?

Going further down the timeline, I want to try to improve that minimalist site, but this desire can't eclipse the desire to keep recording the meaningful thoughts I've had.

[estacado]

If it's only thought-recording, then it's fine. But the reason I wanted to blog in the first place was to make a kind of online notebook where code snippets, useful videos/audio, progress history etc. are online and easily searchable. Kind of an personal online reference, but accessible by the public. It's just too much work. It's a good idea for a startup though - User friendly online notebook.

[bigiain]

Those are probably skills you want to get better at anyway, right? Even if "your code speaks for itself", I. Your career you're going to need to write (or at least contribute to) documentation, specs, requirements, proposals, pitches, business plans, here's a _lot_ of writing tasks that are really just "part of the job", hell - you're going to have to write a few versions of your cv and matching cover letters.

Maybe "actually doing work" by blogging is more of a skillset increasing (and caree advancing) exercise than it seems at first...

Big (busily not following my own advice...)

[nitrogen]

Using one of the free themes available on Posterous, Tumblr, etc. as a starting point can give you a good head start on looks and readability. I can't claim to have solved your other problems, but for embedding code, I've used Github gists, and added some CSS to my blog's template to make the gists fit in as much as possible. It took some manual work up front, but after that it's mostly a matter of copying and pasting the embed code for the gist. I'm using Posterous, for what it's worth.