I've been meaning to write myself a blog for a while. As my roommate described, it would have several benefits:
- Helps keep you organized and distills things you've learned or thought about recently.
- Lets you offload ideas from your mind.
- Lets you reference those ideas later.
- Ever have that moment where you remember solving something, but don't remember how?
- Lets you get exposure for your thoughts.
It occured to me today that Gist makes the perfect platform for blogs like these. Why?
- One of the major barriers to entry for writing a blog for me was finding/writing the software, configuring wordpress, or something of the sort, and then finding a cheap/free host for it and maintaining it. Gist hosts my content for me.
- Gist supports markdown! This means I can have some pretty formatting instead of just text files.
- I can embedd images as well!
- They're more or less permanently hosted. No need to worry about backups or harddrive failures.
- They're written through the wonderful Ace editor.
- They're all assosciated with my account for easy searching if I want to look up how I solved a problem before.
- Coworkers/friends can comment with their own thoughts on the topic, and they can use markdown as well.
- I can submit revisions if I find an error in the blog posts.
- I/someone else can fork/clone/revise it if I have a better idea to solve the problem I'm blogging about, and related solutions are all automatically linked to eachother.
So, Here's my first entry in (hopefully) a long line of personal expositions and reflections on programming and the like.