Here we go, then: another try at writing a blog.

I've toyed with Wordpress in the dim and distant past, before spending a few years posting intermittently to a Blogger account. I've even given Tumblr a spin (albeit for teaching rather than personal use). None of them have been ideal for me. None of them were simple enough or streamlined enough.

Of course, since then I've become much more active on social media. Twitter has become my go-to tool for short messaging (I'm @python33r, if you're interested) and I use Google+ to a lesser degree, for media sharing and longer-than-140-character posts (you'll find me at http://plus.google.com/+NickEfford, if you're 'one of the few' :-).

I'm a believer in G+, as it happens. It's superior to Facebook in most respects, although I'll freely concede that it is unlikely to be anything other than a bit-player in this space, in relative terms. The simplicity of posting and sharing in G+ is a big draw, but its achilles heel is the very limited set of options it offers for the formatting of posts. Hence my putative return to the blogosphere.

And so to Silvrback. When I discovered it, I instantly fell in love with its clean looks, modern design, ease of configuration and, above all, the use of Markdown for article formatting. (I use reStructuredText extensively for writing teaching materials, so the idea of lightweight mark-up is already dear to my heart.) I'm hoping that these things inspire me to blog more frequently, but ultimately I guess it's going to come down to whether work and other distractions leave me with enough time to marshal my thoughts into something at least semi-coherent :)