Years ago when I started my own little place on the web, I created my own content management system to easily update my website.
In the meantime a lot has changed. After Livejournal a variety of blogging platforms popped up, like Blogger, Tumblr and Wordpress.
WordPress is a popular platform, which system you can install on your own webspace. The biggest advantage is that you can build everything the way you like. The biggest drawback however is that you are responsible of doing maintenance and making backup’s yourself.
For new blogs I would recommend a self hosted website + your own domain name. It might be a bit more challanging at first, but you don’t want to be moving your site around or changing URLs at a later time.
Nombelina.com runs on Wordpress and is hosted privately.
My domain names are registered at Godaddy and TransIP.
Expect to read more about blogging at this page. Until then you can contact me through email for questions or to hire my services.