Designing a blog for my own site

I've been dinking around with blosxom and its many plugins with a view to implementing a blog on the Lair website. I have a configuration that looks fairly nice. However...

I haven't added in comments capability, and I want comments.  Nice as blosxom is, it doesn't seem to be much supported anymore, and one of the problems I want to avoid is comment-spam--that is, spammers using the comments sections of my blog as free advertising.  Blosxom doesn't seem to have much of anything for dealing with that, or at least I haven't found any plug-ins for that purpose.

My hosting service, Dreamhost, offers WordPress, which is an actively supported, full-featured blog/CMS package.  It does have features for dealing with comment-spam.  Originally, I steered away from it when I was re-implenting the GNO Suzuki Forum's Event and Calendar pages (see this post) because using Wordpress for that is like using a Lamborghini to drive to the grocery store.

However, the demands of my personal blog/stuff journal might well be Lamborghini-grade...