Of course, the snag with listing all my latest del.icio.us bookmarks publicly is that it reveals what I'm up to on a daily basis. Yes, I confess, I'm doing some experimentation work with blogging engine Typepad. But not strictly in connection with a 'blog'.
I've mentioned here before that I'm a big fan of using blogging engines as Content Management Systems. For minimal cost – in this case, less than £70 for a year's service – you can be up and running in next-to-no time, with a website offering WYSIWYG authoring, reasonable workflow, good search, automatic RSS feeds, subject categorisation, basic traffic stats – plus blogging bits like comments and trackbacks if you want them.
Perhaps most importantly, there's a great choice of authoring tools. In the past I've been a big fan of w.bloggar, which works well with Typepad – although for my own purposes, I'm currently favouring the Deepest Sender extension for Firefox, which may not. Plus of course, for the seriously tech-challenged, there's always the option of posting via email… just send an email to a given address, and it'll get posted automatically to the blog. Brilliant.
The Typepad experience has been a bit frustrating, but ultimately fruitful. Setting up a blog with their default designs is (predictably) a doddle. But my plan was always to build completely customised templates, integrating with the host site's design. They have a selection of pre-coded 'modules' (ie. includes) which are supposed to help, but I just found they got in the way. The help documentation isn't especially well organised, either. But having (eventually) found the right pages in the knowledge base, it's been fairly easy to produce the templates… and I'm very pleased with the results. I hope to get them live shortly.