This is harder than it looks

So the decision is made: I'm going to throw caution to the wind and become a blogger. As they say over at Gaping Void:

So yeah, I'm jumping on this bandwagon. I've done a bunch of thinking and now I envision myself as the smartest person ever and about to take over the world. Except, not so much.

I've secured www.threeseven.ca for this blog, which is kind of fun. Three Seven being the age where I hit this midlife crisis, and .ca being where I live. Also representative of the fact that threeseven.com was taken, as was 37.com, 3seven.com, three7.com, and most of those in .net to boot. I also secured a .com for my other blog, the one that's going to make me a fortune, the one that is the best idea ever, and don't you get nosy, you mcsmartypants, I'll tell you when the time is ready. But neither one was painless.

There are a zillion options for buying a domain name, and within those options are a zillion more options. Yahoo? Godaddy? Bell? Rogers? Telus? Eight zillion dodgy looking domain name providers on the interweb? How much do they cost? Yahoo ranged from $1.99 for just the domain name, but I couldn't buy a .ca through them. Telus wanted 14.99 for a .com and 24.99 for a .ca. And they're seriously all over the map like that. Could be free, could cost a fortune. Then you also figure out what else you want. Do you want email? One email address? 10? Unlimited? Do you want hosting? Do you want mySQL support? Huh? Do you?

This is totally overwhelming for me. I have a hard time making decisions on things like this in the first place, but when I'm trying to learn about this at the same time as making decisions it's hideous. Obviously it would make more sense to just learn all I need to learn then make decisions, but where's the fun in that? So as usual, instead of comparing options and coming up with the "best" alternative, I will instead just find someplace I feel comfortable and have at it. Which is what I did. For my bigfancyidea.com site, I went with Yahoo, which was reasonably priced and was easy enough to carry out. I'm a little bit concerned with dealing with a US company, because there are probably some ridiculous obscure rules about that sort of thing I'm not aware of. But I'll live with that.

Anyway, so that's done. Then I got threeseven.ca for this one, which kind of freaked me out too, because I basically had to sign my life away on this eight million page contract in order to get a .ca address. And of course I didn't read it all, isn't that the hallmark of the internet? Nobody reads those things. So I agreed, and hopefully I haven't agreed to donating my firstborn or never criticizing Stephen Harper. Because both of those things are equally impossible.

So then I am trying to figure out how to do what I want to do. I want to have a blog where I can customize the content in the sidebars and customize the header, basically.. something I can't seem to do on this version of typepad. I'll have to upgrade to the pro version, which isn't cheap. So I am checking out blogger and wordpress, but honestly, I can't figure out if they can do what I want to do either, because I read this stuff and get totally overwhelmed and feel stupid. And then I go read the fark forums for a while to feel smarter, which usually works.

Anyway. Anyone have any tips? Free CSS coding? Tequila?