Recently, it dawned upon me that I haven't sat down and wrote down anything of substance for a while. Oh sure, there's the occasional research paper that I spearhead, but that often feels like work. Additionally, I can't just put it up somewhere for everyone to see while it's under review. And even after review, who wants to read some random research paper anyways?
So here's my thing ( which I hope I'll stick with ). I'm going to write. All the time. It could be anything I fancy or can even think about. The point is to develop and hone my technique and so-called "voice" by pure and simple practice. Every week ( let's say weekend-ish ), I'll post something up. It can be something of substance, like an article detailing my latest research or something absolutely trivial ( but somewhat interesting ) like my favorite song of the week.
GitHub Pages
I enjoy writing but it seems to me a lot of my time spent on blogging platforms ( such as Posterous, Blogger, etc. ) happened to reside with formatting. As a self-proclaimed design and typography geek, I could spend hours upon hours tweaking the look and feel of a particular blog post without really adding much content. In the end all I have is a really clean and nice looking sentence or two.
I looked around for ( and even thought of writing my own ) a solution to this fickly problem. While writing I enjoy using Markdown because it allows me to write a well-formatted post in a plain ol' text editor without all that extra cruft that I didn't really need or care about. The difficulty was then putting that onto a site and making it look good in the process.
Then I found a little something called GitHub pages.
If you don't write code for a living or as a hobby then GitHub will probably be unknown or foreign to you. That's ok. The gist of it is that I can type up my posts and articles in the lovely mark-up language Markdown, type a few commands in the terminal, and pow it's synced and ( almost ) instantly displayed online.
Additionally, I would have support for handy dandy things like...
Latex Support!
I just start with some dollar signs, some notation, and boom! $$r_{s} = \frac{2Gm}{c^2}$$ Schwarzschild radius.
Code w/ syntax highlighting!
def hello:
print 'Hello!'
Just think of all those fancy posts with code I'll get to write someday. Oooh boy my giblets are tingling already.