A friend said that he was thinking of starting a blog, and asked for some technical advice. This is what I replied:

There are two ways of having a blog. One involves getting the whole thing at the same time (the hosting and the blog itself). Blogger does this, as you found, but I wouldn't recommend them. I know someone (an experienced blogger) who used them and hated the whole experience. I would much more recommend WordPress (both of my blogs are WordPress, and that's where the Blogger-hater ended up as well). I also know a lot of people who use LiveJournal, but that's (it seems) more for people who want to connect with other LJ users (there are a lot of ways to restrict who sees which posts, etc.).

WordPress is located here: www.wordpress.com. (The site for the software itself is www.wordpress.org.)

The other way of having a blog is to get hosting separately (for example, if you have an existing website and want to add a blog to it), and then have the blogging software installed. You can install it yourself, though most web hosting companies offer it as an automatic service, which is better because then they can do the updates for you. This is what I did, since I already owned the u-town.com domain and was adding the blog to the existing site(s).

(My original blog was installed manually, and the description of what would have been necessary to update the software myself was so alarming that I installed another blog, using the automatic function, and copied all of the entries over by hand.)

For your purposes, option #1 would probably be better. There are many (many) "themes" available for WordPress, which you can use to alter the look and layout of your blog without having to code anything yourself. You could change the theme every day if you wanted to.

My main blog (www.u-town.com/collins, this one) uses a theme called Blixed, which I didn't design. I don't think I even customized it at all, though I may have done a tweak or two. The utown writing site (www.utownwriting.com) started with the default theme ("Classic") which I've modified quite extensively, both in appearance and in organization. Almost all of the links down the right are set manually, by me, and the "previous" and "next" links in the entries are manual as well (since they have to link to the previous and next parts of the current story, and those are not necessarily the previous and next blog entries).

So, as I say, WordPress gives a lot of options and many people create themes and addins that you can use (addins are little programs that provide additional functions – I use one that does automatic backups of the database, one that allows portions of a post to be hidden until a link is clicked, and one that reverses WordPress's preference for "smart" quotes over straight quotes).