Seriously, the service is brain-dead easy to use, scales wonderfully, and took me 30 seconds to set up, rather than the <X time units> that it would take to set up what the OP describes. If you don't like tumblr, use posterous, or wordpress, or rock it old school with blogger. I don't get why so many people take the time to set these things up when there are better things to do, such as actually writing to your blog.
Pro tip: unless you're really popular, no one cares how you power your blog... they care about what you write on it.
I don't like that "Tumblr reserves the right to remove any Subscriber Content from the Site, suspend or terminate Subscriber’s right to use the Services at any time, or pursue any other remedy or relief available to Tumblr and/or the Site under equity or law, for any reason [...] or for no reason at all."
[http://www.tumblr.com/policy/en/terms_of_service]
That "or for no reason at all" part is a bit bothersome.
I thought the whole hacker nomenclature revolved around tinkering, crafting, and creating. The type of person that is compelled by an idea they had for their blog and then they enjoyed implementing it.
So unless you propose a blogging system that facilitates the hacker urge, how does it have anything to do with hackers?
I'll agree with you partly, but hacking with something just because you can hack with it can be a huge distraction as well. Put another way, "maintaining a blog" is a professional development goal, which can and will have direct benefit to many hackers. "Hacking together your own blog" is a fun side project, with the side benefit of you learning a new technology. However, I fear that most hackers would spend far more time coding their blog than writing to it, which completely undermines the purpose of having a blog in the first place.
I started my blog partly to get things off my chest, partly to gain eyeballs - call me crazy, but having eyeballs that listen to your messages feels great.
Which is why "maintaining a blog" is not necessarily distinct from "hacking together your own blog" (which is not something I'm doing btw, as I'm using already available tools). The reasons for that have to do with methods of gaining conversions.
Conversions are hard to gain. Good content is kind, however many people that write good content then wonder why they don't get conversions. And sometimes it doesn't have anything to do with your content, but with the actual presentation. Marketing people have a word for it: "merchandising".
And if the blog is important to you, then it makes sense to approach it just like you would approach application development. You start with something simple, then gradually add to it. You also respond to user feedback. You make sure your design is bearable to read (I've skipped on many blogs with awful designs, which is why tools like Readability are a gift to our world). You also may be interested in doing A/B testing. And so on.
Doing this on e.g. Wordpress is doable as it has a great community and lots of plugins. But messing around with plugins, fixing dependencies and vulnerabilities, getting rid of crap you don't need, optimizing the user experience, finding a theme that doesn't make your eyes bleed and so on ... also takes lots and lots of time. There's no silver bullet.
I also like Tumblr, but it is unsuitable for the purposes of my blog. Tumblr is designed for writing opinions longer than tweats or for posting pictures. It isn't designed for long tutorials that also have code in them.
With my Jekyll blog I could even write a plugin / or some kind of script that runs/tests the posted code for me. And do so automatically on submit. And having your content in GitHub - is so freaking awesome. If you don't see it, just wait until somebody sends you a pull request for a fix in your article.
I'll agree with you that there is some fun in putting the whole thing together. However, "merchandising" is definitely far too strong a word... (1) very few people will create better themes all by themselves than what Tumblr/Posterous/Blogger already made, and (2) the css for each of those sites is completely editable, so you can customize to your heart's content. This makes sense with your testing approaches as well... you can implement A/B testing with a blogging service just as you could with a homebrew solution.
Regard your "isn't designed for long tutorials with code" post:
That's my blog, and it's a tutorial. It's not the best, but it's got code, it's got links, it's got pictures, and I could have put youtube there if I wanted to. You can definitely do heavy lifting using these solutions, and you can use all the time you saved to work on making your actual product that much better.
An issue I had was that there is no easy/seemless way to include code snippets in tumblr. A google search brings up a couple ways you can make it possible but its not something I want to do for every post I want to have code in.
I'd immediately switch to a blogging platform that was like tumblr or blogger but with an easy way to include code.
Currently what I do is paste only short sections into the blog and link to the proper syntax highlighted code on pastebin, or if it is on Googe code or github directly to it there.
The only problem I've had is embedding github gists in tumblr (or any other javascript-based embed). Putting code snippets in is trivial using Markdown.
1.5. Make backups. A periodic wget would be better than nothing, though I don't think it would grab the parts hosted on AWS. e-mail to posterous does backups as a side effect, but you still need to grab Disqus comments using their API.
Very good point. I write (and save) all my posts to Simplenote, so I forgot to mention this. I don't save any of my Disqus comments. Definitely do this.
I believe that simply redirecting the base URL obviates the need of setting up redirects for each post, but it's been a long while since I looked into that. Hopefully someone else will give you a more definitive answer.
1. User tumblr.
2. You're done.
Seriously, the service is brain-dead easy to use, scales wonderfully, and took me 30 seconds to set up, rather than the <X time units> that it would take to set up what the OP describes. If you don't like tumblr, use posterous, or wordpress, or rock it old school with blogger. I don't get why so many people take the time to set these things up when there are better things to do, such as actually writing to your blog.
Pro tip: unless you're really popular, no one cares how you power your blog... they care about what you write on it.