You recently decided hosted blogging is for the birds. You want more control over your blog’s setup. In fact, you want total control over every last detail of your layout, functionality and design. So what do you do? Where do you turn?

One popular option is the Movable Type publishing system from Six Apart (other popular options include Drupal, Joomla!, and WordPress). Movable Type contains pretty much everything you need to get your own site up and running, plus the flexibility to get really obsessive over the details. Also, with a little creativity and some community-created plugins, you can power much more than just a reverse-chronological list of blog posts.

This tutorial won’t go into the Movable Type installation process in-depth since there are many resources online already. What we’ll cover is the process of dressing up a vanilla Movable Type installation by customizing the look and feel of your new site. We’ll also get you started with some custom features by installing some plugins.

Back when blogging was just catching on, a small PHP-based publishing system was quietly released and quickly took the blogging community by storm. WordPress, as the system was known, was an instant hit thanks to its simplicity and open-source license which allowed interested developers to extend and improve the system without hassle.

Today, WordPress powers everything from huge sites like CNN’s Political Tracker to thousands of personal blogs. Thanks to an easy step up process and the widespread availability of web hosts offering one-click WordPress installs, you can start blogging with WordPress in a snap.

In this tutorial, we’ll assume your web host doesn’t have a one-click installer. Maybe you’ve got a bare-bones host, you’ve decided to host your own site, or you’re simply setting up a local installation to see what WordPress can do. At any rate, fear not — getting WordPress working on your server only takes a few minutes. Of course, you’ll need a few skills in the bag first, like a knowledge of PHP and a comfortable working relationship with MySQL databases.

Once your blog is up and running, we’ll take a look at different ways you can customize and extend your blog.