Blogging Advice? - Best sites?

Yes, *blogging *not dogging - so no propositions please.

Im thinking of starting a blog, mainly for myself to keep track of stuff I do and help me organise my self too. I have a bad memory, poor attention span and a million hobbies & projects im working on at any time. Things can get a little mixed up and take much longer than they should. Also, I often look back and cant remember what ive been doing for the past few months! I noticed that a lot of people here have blogs so I thought it would be a good place to ask for some advice. I mainly just want suggestions on the best site/service, any other tips would also be helpful. Some details of what im looking for are as follows:

Well I probably want sections,

Bike Stuff - Design Projects - Music Projects - Random hobbies & fun - photography - university coursework - personal "thoughts" of the day.

Id like each page to have a slightly different theme, perhaps just a different colour background. But they should all be easily accessible and clearly layed out etc. It would be cool if theres a possibility to do more complicated custom page design for it in the future too, when Ive got to grips with it.

Also, id like some decent integration/easy to use picture hosting to use with it. Something I can be confident wont go offline or easily run out of space. Custom URL is a bonus but not too bothered. Ive heard good things about google picasa, which I imagine has some sort of integration with blogger right?

Well I hope you can help ; )

if you're remotely thinking of putting it on your own domain go with wordpress. blogger is probably the easiest to set up and go but if you do get into it remotely seriously you'll end up regretting not going with wordpress

blogger is not very user friendly to me
im on xanga now

Both of your, thank for your replies - havent had as many as I thought I would!

SO more info would be appreciated.

Kelvin: Why is Wordpress so good?
Brian: How is Blogger not user friendly?

for eg. if u wanna post pics, u need to upload on to blogger instead of using a link

Wordpress. It just works, and is mostly invisible which is as it should be. Spend your time blogging and not thinking about the tools... that there is what Wordpress does.

Moving Target is textpattern. Works really well for me.

Movable Type is another blogging tool. I've not used it but it looks quite nice.

uber.com

uber.com

Ive signed up to that, looks pretty good, will give it a try.

Im a sucker for "being" different, blogger seemed too common.
And to me wordpress looked old fashioned and fiddly. I mean, do you really need to install an app & get an ftp to run it from? seems excessive.

thankyou.

feel free to keep the suggestions rolling though.

maybe?.... add to reputation

Im a sucker for "being" different, blogger seemed too common.

So am I, I went for Tumblr which is fucking great, surprisingly flexible and easy, I managed to score a great looking theme and added a photo my girlfriend took of London in the background;

http://edscoble.tumblr.com/

And to me wordpress looked old fashioned and fiddly. I mean, do you really need to install an app & get an ftp to run it from? seems excessive.

wordpress is the Linux of blogging, it's just too complicated for even me.

So am I, I went for Tumblr which is fucking great, surprisingly flexible and easy, I managed to score a great looking theme and added a photo my girlfriend took of London in the background;

http://edscoble.tumblr.com/

Looks f***ing mad. Nice one!

Dredge here from the Murky depths of 2008.

I'm thinking of starting a blog using wordpress. My problem is I've got several subjects I'd like to write about much like DFP.

Is this possible in just one blog? Or would I need several blogs? Surely I can just separate it using categories?

Yeah, just separate it with categories on the same blog. The bonus is that if you've got something that reasonably crosses over two different subjects then you can just add it to both categories simultaneously without copying it over. I'd say don't use a separate blog for separate things unless you want to completely separate the two identities as well as the topics, if you see what I mean.

Cheers mate. That's what I'm talking about.

I think I'll name is something personal for now but then talk about the other subjects.

Thread resuscitation #2. Which blog sites have nice text handling? In my experience, most of the platforms seem to make the text look like it's come straight from a BBC Micro or Acorn. Surely there must be some platform with pretty text handling?

It's typography on the web, what were you hoping for?

You can achieve adequate typography with any blog that you can control the CSS on. Wordpress works well if you host it yourself.

I have my own webspace and have used wordpress but its text handling is awful. Not so much to look at, but it never seems to pay the least bit of attention to the formatting you apply, particularly if you want different sizes in the same post (at least if you are in noob mode, which I always am). Since you know about such things, what exactly is it about the way that html handles text that means it can't look really nice (like, for example, LaTeX typesetting?) I've never understood the distinction.

Is wordpress still the way to go?
Should i host a domain myself or through wordpress?

Any good links for wordpress starter advice?

Thanks

I love how this thread's had several resuscitations already :)

What did you go with in the end @skinny?

There seem to be so many platforms out there now - and so many lists of 'the best blogging platforms'.

Can anybody recommend some they've used personally? I found Google's Blogger OK for a travel blog but I reckon there are better ones out there...

I usually rely on Tumblr as the iPhone app is pretty straightforward, can draft post until you get an internet connection.