I've used several tools to create and manage this site, all of which are free. The blog itself is powered by Blogger, a Google-owned platform offering ease of use and moderate flexibility. Images, when not appropriate to hotlink, are hosted by Picasa Web Albums, another Google service which is integrated into Blogger for uploading images to blog posts. The blog's RSS feeds are managed by Feedburner, yet another Google service for tweaking and analyzing custom site feeds. Site activity is monitored by Sitemeter, a handy tool that lets you see where your traffic is coming from and other relevant details. Bookmarking is provided by AddThis, which allows visitors to share pages via a service of their choice. I do my small part to combat spam with a link Spam Poison, a clever site that traps and ruins email harvesters with fake addresses. And of course, I do all of this with the free open source browser Firefox.
All information I create as part of this blog falls under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license (CC BY-NC 3.0), meaning that you are free to share, reproduce, and modify the content without my permission as long as you attribute the original work to me and do not use it for commercial purposes.