When I first went to set up a blog, I wanted something I had the option of hacking on myself, based on a decent programming language and decent toolkit. Being a Pythonista, I looked for something Django based, and settled on Byteflow. I set it up and started blogging.
This turns out to have been very much the wrong choice. There’s been one commit against Byteflow since September 2011, I’ve had trouble every time I’ve needed to upgrade, and I was overrun with spam until the last upgrade when comments broke. So this time I’m going the other way—choosing the awful, PHP-based WordPress, which is also by far the most popular platform for blogging in the world, and hosting it on WordPress.com instead of trying to host it myself, which should mean it stays up to date with security and anti-spam measures.
Let’s hope this leads to better and more productive conversations. Thanks for joining me!
Minds aren't magic 
All the very best with your new endeavour!
Many thanks for encouraging me to create it!
The PHP problem: all the good stuff is written in it. wordpress.com is probably the best idea, yes.