To be honest I'm kind of confused right now and something I said earlier might not be correct.
EDIT:
I didn't really say anything that was incorrect on the last page, but I might've been a bit ambiguous. I am sorry to say that this is probably all very confusing. Just in general, if you want an object to look like it is rotating around itself, always call glTranslate first, and then call glRotate. However, technically speaking, what it does is it rotates the object first, and then translates it out to the world position, but dont' worry about those details until you get used to doing basic first.
glTranslate(pos.x,pos.y,pos.z);
glRotate(angle,axis.x,axis.y,axis.z);
that will always have the effect of an object rotating around itself