Well well well... Setting up a simple blog is more work than I thought.
With work stealing all my time, finding some time to actually dig into setting up a blog meant skipping a night's sleep.

Here's my choice: a plain Drupal 7 with the following modules: Markdown, Tagadelic, CAPTCHA, Ajax comments, Pathauto.

I won't go into too much details about setting up Drupal, since it's pretty easy for such a simple site. I got most of my inspiration for the setup from this site.

I'm using Apache for now but I intend to switch to nginx soon to give myself an opportunity to play around with it since it seems like a pretty nice and powerful web server. I'll probably have some tales to tell about installation, config and integration with puppet by then.

The hardest part now, will be finding a beautiful theme and to customize it. (edit: well, I checked out all of the themes there and nothing caught my eyes except for Dartik, which is a dark variation of the Bartik theme -- the default D7 theme)

Stay tuned, I promiss I'll make the non-initial posts more interesting. This post is mostly here to have some content and to test how things work/look.