OT - How do I start a blog?

Unfortunately, I had to delete this post due to privacy concerns.

The best blogs are one you pay to host. None of the "free-hosted" blogs (blogger, wordpress.org) are good for what you're listing above. While it's free you will be at the mercy of their terms of service, where they can use your information any way you please, and you will NOT have full control of the blog- be it design elements or root access to the server. You also may not be allowed to monitize your blog unless you host it yourself.

If you want full control over your information, and have all the bells and whistles, you have to pay for it.

That means:

1) buying a web hosting: Recommended ones: dreamhost and media temple GS
2) Pick a blooging platform: joomla, drupal, wordpress (all are free open source). The best one is wordpress for people who just want a simple blog. If you want something more flexible and robust with potentail for expansion: drupal.
3) Buy a theme from a place like themeforest, because free ones suck and are OFTEN have cross browser compatiibity problems
 OR
4) Hire a professional web boutique to design a theme to your specifications.

Hosting will cost a minimum of $100 a year
Buying a ready-made theme for your blog $30-$80
Having one custom designed: $500-$5000 depending on how complicated you want your site to be and what features you want it to have. If you want web applications the price will be high. If you want simple dynamic HTML pages, it won't be that high.

Provided that you just want a blog of good design- but with nothing fancy like web apps or a robust user system-  for x-browser and iphone you'lre probably lookin at startup costs of arond $200 to $300 dollars betwen buying the hosting and a theme for the blog.

Unfortunately, I had to delete this post due to privacy concerns.

Just use typepad.  It's more than adequate for your purposes.

Then I'd go woth worpress.org (http://wordpress.org/). Wordpress has some neat features snd you have some more flexibility than other free blogs, and it's pretty easy to use. I would recommend it over blogger.

I use blogger.  It is fairly easy to use although for some reason it will not let me reply to my posts..  idk..  good luck

Yay!  Excited you're thinking of starting an external blog!  I use Blogger for mine... but I've set up Wordpress for many people, and used LiveJournal for many years.  I like Blogger because it's slightly more popular, and it's easy to follow other blogs, plus the interface is super easy to use.  WordPress has a nice interface, but just a lil bit more complicated than Blogger... and LiveJournal is really great, has an external program you can use to upload blog posts, has a nice mobile interface for posting, etc... but not that many people use it anymore (that I can tell)...  It's probably my favorite one, though.

I can attempt to help you out, just let me know. :)

Nic