What do people use these days when they want to self host something a bit more light weight? I have setup a few wordpress installations but really if I wanted something to tinker with I think I would look elsewhere, the code has you trawl though many files at times to make simple changes.
Jekyll (http://jekyllrb.com) is a "blog aware static site generator." I use it to power my blog and I love it. You write your layouts in HTML or HAML using the Liquid templating language and then your posts can be in markdown/textile/whatever and you run Jekyll - it generates static HTML files and publishing is just a SCP away.
Jekyll is a nice way to generate a static HTML blog.
A step above that is Frog CMS.
Closer to WordPress are Habari and Chyrp, which are still fairly lightweight.
