I’ve tried numerous aborted attempts to kick off a blog in the past. The usual pattern is feverish enthusiasm at the outset, finding tools, creating an identity, tweaking artwork, an initial post or two etc etc, which rapidly diminishes into disinterest as I find that the hassle of setting up the blog site itself wasn’t actually all just setting up and that some of that hassle continues on in the blog ownership experience.
This time I’m confident that things will be different, and here’s why…
Posting Code
One headache that always crops up is that I want to post code snippets but blogging engines are typically pretty hopeless at doing this. But recent posts by Lars Fosdal brought this syntaxhighlighter to my attention. It’s pretty darn good, although not quite as straightforward to get up and running as it might be.
Having said that, that might be because I am also now using WordPress as my blog engine, something which isn’t directly supported – not least in terms of installation guides for the highlighter itself.
Managing The Content, Not The Engine
Notwithstanding minor hiccups getting syntax highlighting installed and working, WordPress has been by far and away the easiest to get going with of all the different blog engines I have tried. It’s ease of use is an order of magnitude beyond those other systems too. So it’s looking hopeful that my interest level in producing content can be sustained!
For those interested I shall be blogging a little more about my experiences with WordPress and the syntaxhighlighter to fill in the gaps when I have nothing interesting to say about Delphi.
In the meantime, please bear with me as I settle in to my blog.
These are interesting times for Delphi, with Tiburon looming ever nearer on the horizon, and I hope to convey some of my enthusiasm for both the history, as well as the future, of my personal development tool of choice.