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1) Starting up: First of all. It’s really recommended to use WordPress as the CMS.

I'd say programming your own is a way to show off your street cred. Everyone and their brother uses wordpress and you visit one its the same as visiting the next 10,000 -- boooring. Wordpress and other common blog templates seem to crumple during any time of major traffic as well. What's the point of writing a blog and then having it go down the moment you have a chance to show it off en-mass to the world?

It's NOT hard to write your own blog. Of course I'm biased since, well, I wrote my own blog :)

2) Writing news

Not sure what the author is going for here. But if I were writing this I'd just compact it all down to "write about what you know and love"

3) Writing technology comparison, general opinion and tutorials

Two and three are basically the same. Smash it all up and still write about what you know and love.

4) Becoming known

The author seems to have a love affair with Technorati, I found both google and technorati to be too static and good-ol-boy for a new blog to break in. I personally love DZONE, it's the gateway to del.icio.us and digg and sometimes reddit (though reddit doesn't do much in the way of programming anymore and the stuff that does make it to programming.reddit.com reads like doctoral thesis/opinions, either that or it's some lame haskel piece).

Fully half the articles I submited to dzone got bumped up to del.icio.us's home page, two of those went on to frontpage digg. One quarter of the articles that mainlined on dzone also got streamed on stumbleupon which, I think, is the internet's biggest, unknown major site. It will stream as much traffic to your site as a mainlined digg article but over the course of several days instead of several hours.

One thing is for darn certain, once you're listed on digg or del.icio.us google pays a crapload of attention to your pages. For one thing being mainlined on a major agregator puts you on the head of the line on their indexing services, if your page was waiting to be indexed it will be immediately indexed and available as part of their search results and you WILL get a higher page rank.

The frustrating thing is that the agregators can be hit or miss on technical articles. Digg is VERY hit or miss since most of the tech guys who vote stuff up have moved on. DZone is fairly consistent on mainlining good, well written technical articles but sometimes they miss articles that seem "too obvious" which is a common problem: an article which seems "too obvious" to someone with a great deal of technical experience is probably exactly the type of article people just starting out are craving.

A good example is a recent article I wrote about dynamically inserting javascript into an existing html page (a method used by external json calls), it's VERY simple javascript, the kind you'd roll your eyes at really and it languished in dzone's upcomming links until the editors decided to mainline it on a slow weekend, even still it did only moderately well on dzone (14 votes) but it was nearly instantly picked up by del.icio.us.

5) Don’t expect money from ads

So, so, so, so right. Even with a digg effect you can expect only pennies from your adsense. A technical blog will do far better with highly targeted amazon affiliate links or affiliate links to web-hosting companies, even then, even if you do hit the big time, chances are no matter what you do a technical blog will earn only hosting-costs + pocket change. So don't quit your day job.

Was still a good read :)