My answer is probably boring, but it works, and I had fun with my own. Just set up Wordpress. At this point, you can find templates for any site design imaginable, and there are a million plugins for it. It’s an all-around solid platform, that has mountains of documentation. Wordpress was made for blogging, can’t go wrong there, but I’ve used it for all kinds of stuff, including ecommerce. It’s simple and effective enough that I have a hard time going any other direction.
I used to host Wordpress sites on a home LAMP server; it was a fun project that didn’t cause a bunch of headaches, mainly because of the amount of available documentation. Search “wordpress self-host” and you’ll find a whole lot of information.
Good luck with whatever you decide on!
Had a friend come out to me just yesterday, and his story is identical. So much so that I had to creep your account to make sure you weren’t him.
The similarity doesn’t tell me that two people are going through this, it tells me that statistically, tens of thousands must be. Depressing, but yours is good news. Rickety parental unit aside, I hope you’re feeling as great as my buddy is; I could both see and hear that a tremendous weight had been lifted from his soul.
Best of luck to you and what this new future holds!