I have finally given in to pressure from colleagues and friends to set up an blog/ photo blog/ website, something I've been putting of forever now.  

Here's more about my setup - 

1. Registered domain name with GoDaddy.

2. GoDaddy as my hosting provider. I was looking to do most of my development in a windows environment, .NET, IIS and SQL Server support was essential.

3. Picked BlogEngine.Net an open-source .NET blog engine to host the blog. Although GoDaddy advertises support and free installation for some application include BlogEngine.NET, technical support found some compatibality issues with my setup - IIS7, .NET 3.5, Integrated Mode. So, I ended up deploying it myself.

4. For the photo blog I'm using the rather slick Slide.Show Silverlight Control library, also an open-source project on codeplex.

It took all of three hours from registering my domain name to have this blog up and running, a suprisingly fast and rather pleasant experience.