Reasons for Blogging and Finding a Blog Host

I finally decide to create my own blog. Why? It is a way to establish a track record of my career and my life, or, my career life -- for my personal life, I would like to set up another blog or web site :-) This is especially important for programming in the age of Internet, when using and contributing to open source projects are everyday practices. I can envision that after a while, a year or so, the blog can be a valuable resource, for my open source friends, my employers/co-workers, and even for myself.

However, regarding to my real world identity, there are two concerns here:
(a) I know what the trade secrets are for the company. However, there is always a large gray area.
(b) My Open Source activities are not always aligned with my work as an employee.

So, as a mechanism of multi-layer firewalls; I will do both of the following:
(a) I will not talk about details of any real system; I will always talk about public domain example systems;
(b) I will not expose my real world identity in this blog -- if you know who I am, that is fine; just keep it between you and me ;-)

Which blog hosting should I choose? It depends on the "requirements", of course. Several things in my mind:
(a) a stable one;
(b) with basic services that I can simply assume that they are there -- I do not want to spend time to experiment -- I am the user now -- as a programmer, I cherish this right! I can just assume, can't I?
(c) I want a professional community – I do not need fancy formatting and layout; however, I need good spell checking. Another feature is that readers can search all my blogs to find related topics.
(d) I want to download all my blogs and back it up, in text files/folder format; so that I can backup and/or move to another hosting easily.

This means I need to pick one that is big and "established" -- call me a snob, but for commodity stuff, being a "snob" is a safer bet.

With the above in mind, I googled "free blog hosting". I got "blogger.com" at the top. I did not know whether it was a big one (remember, I am a "snob" here!), so, I was hesitating.

Then, I googled "online community". No meaningful results. I thought about "myspace", but I feel it is mostly for non-professional use (I may be biased). Then, I remembered yahoo. I went there, I saw geocities. I used it before, it was good; but on the other hand, I feel I should look other things before I go there. I also thought about hotmail. But I do not want Microsoft this time -- since I used hotmail already (diversify ...). Then, I thought about google. Why not use google's blogger service -- but does google have a blogger service? I checked -- ha ha! it is blogger.com -- that is why I got it at the top of the search hit!

I know google will be here for at least a while. So, I decide to use it.

While I was writing this blog, I accidentally went to another page. It automatically saved the content. Excellent! one big plus.

I used the spell checking; I noticed that it does not use Ajax for real-time checking while I am typing. One point off. Also, it does not highlight the word (later, I tried "edit html", the hight light seems working). I do not know. Perhaps I will have to try another one hosting?

Because of the lack of (real time) spell checking high light, I used word, then, paste. Then, I saw all the paragraph info was gone. My goodness. I have to try myspace or geocity or hotmail now – I will report my discovery later.

I searched "start blogging", and I read through the results, I found those are useful. I found them are very good, but just scanned through; I will study them later:

http://www.windley.com/essays/2004/how_to_start_a_blog.shtml

http://www.techsoup.org/howto/articles/internet/page2084.cfm

http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2004/12/30/tips-to-start-blogging

http://wiki.ehow.com/Start-a-Blog

P.S. After experimenting with blogger.com, although I still have to use Word for real time spell checking, it seems that it is OK to paste without losing formatting. The key is to know the difference between the "Edit Html" (raw html editing) and "Compose".
Also, I select a template, and changed a few numbers in the template to make it less "prettier", but more utilitarian (more space for my text than for aesthetics).