I spent what felt like a long time (actually: maybe 15 seconds) trying to figure out what sequence of real-world events the "Mike Mulligan" thing was satirizing, before reading the comments and discovering what it was actually referencing. I mention this just in case anyone else has the same knowledge gap (presumably because of being outside the US or not having had small children).

People often run into problems where their "good enough to post" threshold creeps up and up. (...) Sometimes people handle this by dividing their writing into a formal blog and something casual.

Seems to me the best solution would be to have two blogs, post everything on the first one, and later repost/rewrite the most successful posts to the second one.

Probably depends on whether you want to have a discussion below your articles, because this strategy could mess with the discussion flow. However, I am personally quite scared of the idea of having to moderate comments on my blog; if my blog would accidentally happen to be super popular, the moderation could become a nightmare. I would probably go with the "only approved comments are displayed" approach, which slows down the discussion a lot.

With the suggested approach (repost top posts on the other blog), people who regularly read the first blog would probably not visit the second one. But it would be a good starting point for new readers, and a good place for readers who do not want to read the blog regularly.

(I think the same approach could work for LW, to make "Main" the subset of "Discussion", but I don't know how much work this would be technically.)