So many companies want me to blog with them

Everyone is after me to add content to their company's blog site. I am guessing that they believe the content is free to them and they can slip some advertising in and around the blog. In return you get free blog space. Not that anyone ever reads blogs that much.

I first started blogging on a personal web server running on my own personal computer. The page was accessed only by a couple workmates. One of the workmates, Dave, decided he wanted to do something larger and came up with the money for web space and a domain name: POP1. I wrote the code and a number of workmates contributed content but the whole site suddenly died when the ISP took off, leaving us all high and dry without server space or even our data. I still had most of the content from a backup that I kept so I dumped it onto a Geocities site but unforunately the pages are static - no more additions until we could set something else up. Eventually POP1 was resurrected but became more of a personal blog for Dave.

Not that I have much time to toy with these things anyway, but toy I did. This place for instance is quite good. Hotmail has attached "My Space" which appears reasonably flexible in a WYSIWYG way, but is acually quite stifled from adding any of your own code or plugins. Yahoo's image based Flickr seems interesting in a rigid sort of way. I just had in mind using it as a photobucket type thing but they encrypt the image access and the tag they use contains javascript which this and numerous other sites will reject from entering into your blog text.

I have a web server on my ADSL account and may create something in the future but at the moment, the free public options are more than enough.