I think you're right about appearances, but design isn't the core of Patrick's point. If you called your posts "short tutorials" and had a little section on your site that listed your "short tutorials", your work would probably get cited more, and do a better job of marketing your services.

In particular, some clients will eyeball your list of short tutorials, and see "A/B Testing", "HFT Algorithms", and "Ad Placement Optimization" and immediately form positive associations that they won't by paging through your old blog posts, which is something I just had to do to write this paragraph that very few casual readers will actually do.

You write something, you think it has lasting value, you should say so. It's a corollary of "ask for the sale".

I've been planning to build that anyway, simply because some people tell me they've read articles 1 and 3 on a topic, but missed 2 (and 2 would have been useful). It's just harder to motivate myself to reformat my blog than to try out the Julia language. But it'll be useful to people, so I will do it eventually.

You are misunderstanding one thing, however. People don't google "chris stucchio" and then find the tutorials - I think that's the use case you are discussing. They google "python monte carlo simulation" and find a tutorial in blog post format. They learn that I exist if they pay attention to the URL.

I agree with what you said but these blogs are not ugly. In fact I think stephen's blog is pretty good looking.

"Fugly" was probably overstating things - you need to do something non-default to be ugly. Stephen Diehl is default bootstrap. Ben Tilly has no CSS file.