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Comment by rexpop | Hacker News Reader

I didn't get my blog up and running until I a) started keeping a journal on 750words.com and b) started writing in a spiral-bound notebook every spare half-hour.

Those two habits and https://blot.im made blogging nigh-effortless. Like dandruff, I get it for free.

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Oh my problem isn't that at all. I have no problem writing endless amounts of crap that no one will ever read. It's just that I really care about my writing, and I want it to have a perfect home. So I'm constantly writing and rewriting blog engines.

In this case, the perfect is the enemy of no one. A blog engine is the one side-project that I don't just hack. It's my one and only place for writing pure, elegant code.

And I won't let myself write at length again on someone else's platform until I get this exactly right.

Everyone wins: I don't clutter the internet with inane crap; you aren't tempted to read it.

If I ever decide to start publishing my writing, the best part of it will be the code that presents it.

I was(am?) in the same boat as you. I don't like using other platforms because they don't do exactly what I want. I go through the same decision points while trying to maintain a todo list. I guess that is the drawback of being a developer, you know you can do better(for your usecase) job of developing a great application and eventually, writing a blog or maintaining a todo list becomes an excercise in yak shaving (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2est2c_yak-shaving_fun ).

I am trying to get over this habit. Any advice/suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks for sharing this and introducing me to 750words, I just finished my first entry! The analysis provided after just a single writing session is awesome - I can't wait to see how this affects my writing, focus, and ability to communicate with myself and others. Did you see a shift in sentiment, focus or elsewhere in your analysis as you prepared to make your writings public? For instance, I notice a pretty even distribution of Emotion and Mindset which I imagine will become way more focused as I work towards writing in public.

The only writings I make public are short essays I write during the day about victories and frustrations at work. When I am following the "morning pages" habit, I am usually extremely short on focus.

I am extremely pleased with how journaling improves my communication — when I find myself quoting that morning's pages, I get feedback on how decent my predictions were.

I feel more prepared, having hypothesized these circumstances in the morning, the afternoon offers fewer surprises (and novelty still fits nicely in contrast).

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