The way I went about creating this blog is by no means the best way. In fact, my research into web hosts and blog applications took a little less than fifteen minutes so I’m sure you can probably find a better web host or blog app than what I ended up choosing.
If you take a look at the footer down on this page, you’ll notice that this blog is powered by Word Press. Word Press is a blogging application like Xanga. I learned about WP through my friend B who had set up his own blogging site a few years back. I’ve read good things about them and B’s blog looked pretty good (www.saikology.com)
The difference between Xanga and WP is that Xanga is free and WP cost money (sort of). Technically, WP is free. You can download it and run it on your machine without it costing you a dime. However, in order to publish your blog online like you would Xanga, you need to pay a web host to host your blog. Once you do that, you can use WP just like you would Xanga, Blogspot, and any other free blogging blogsites.
You might be asking: why are you paying to blog when you can simply blog for free with Xanga? I touched on this a little bit here. In short, using WP gives me flexibility in playing around with some of the code and design. I also have space to host my pictures if I ever get them uploaded.
As for choosing a web host, I went with WP’s recommendation, Bluehost. I was a little lazy in my selection, but the reviews about BH weren’t bad and they consistently ranked among the top ten web hosts available. They also seemed to be priced fairly for what you get so I pulled the trigger. WP also probably gets a small cut of the money, so I thought it’d be nice to give something to those guys at WP for keeping WP free. You can find out more about them here: Blue Host
Note: I just checked them out and it looks like you get 1500 GB of storage space. WTF? Damn it, I only got 300 GB. I’m going to have to call these bastards up.
The actual setup of this site took about two hours. First I signed up with BH. The process is quite painless if you don’t mind paying for the two year hosting contract up front. The total turned out to be ~$160. Included in the package is a free domain name. If you have a gf who is a marketing major, ask her to think of something catchy for you 
It takes a couple of minutes for the domain to register. Once it does register, go to your url and you’ll see that you just gave birth to a blank page. BH will call you later (an hour or so) to verify that things are working.
Meanwhile, you can download WP and follow their famous five minute install guide. In real world time, it took me longer to get the thing installed. Just follow the instructions to the T and you should be up in no time.
As a side note, I recently updated the software to version 2.5. The process took me about 15 minutes, not the famous 5 minutes WP keeps talking about. Guess I’m slow.
As for my two cents on WP and BH so far, both WP and BH’s admin pages are very user friendly. The only problem I have so far is using word press themes. Even the default theme that comes with WP is not bullet proof. Until I get around to working on my own or finding one that is more bug proof, this blog is going to have to look pretty generic. As for BH, I’ve only recently been getting some crappy service where the site doesn’t load. Hopefully it’s only a short term thing and it doesn’t happen too often.
Hopefully this was helpful to somebody out there.