"commit often" is fine. It's "push often" that gets you into trouble. With an interactive rebase, you can polish up your commits and their messages before pushing them, presenting to your peers a finely crafted (readable, reviewable, maintainable) publication.
Indeed, I only discovered that recently and it makes git pretty cool.
It has the added advantage of being able to merge commits that fix intermediate bugs that you introduced yourself and fixed immediately. There is no reason to bore other people with those.
