What free blog do you recommend?

[freespirit]

Steve: what blog do you recommend? I felt inspired by your story of only spending about $8 (for the cost of the domain name) to start your blog business. I would like to do the same and checking out free blogs. But I am hesitating because I am not sure which one has all the features I want to use such as:

- adding PayPal
- customers can download ebooks
- ads
--- and for later - the capacity for customers to upload files.


I want to start using a free blog and if the business takes off, I want to add more features such as the ones above.

I had a look at WordPress and that's OK, but I don't know whether it has all those functions - they don't in the basic free one, but I don't know about the upgrade ones.

There is also Lycos Tripod blogs - I think they're OK but something about the format I don't like that much, eg. the typing window is small.

Then there is Blogger (Google). I really don't like Google and want to avoid this one if I can.

Thanks for any advice or recommendations.

BTW, I have practically zero programming skills and I work from a Mac (a Powerbook laptop).

I am prepared to pay money later to upgrade the blog if I need more features.

But what I want is reassurance that most blog companies do provide those features I want because I don't want to invest time in building up a blog to find I have to switch blogs because of lack of functionality.