Design Blogg

I had this idea to create a blog that friends from school could use. I need a blog with these features:

- easy to design/ editing capabilities
- a chat room where you can sign into and use it like an IM
- fun!

My family and i are going overseas in acouple of months, for quite awhile. I cant use the internet as much, nor can i contact my friends often. Im planning to make a blog so they can see how im doing, everyone agrees i should.
But I’m compeltely lost in choosing a blog host for my new blog! I don’t know whether i should use livejournal, free webs, or blogger?

I like designing my own layouts and pages etc. I know ALOT about the html lanuage. Getting used to web hosts isn’t a problem for me. I had/have a website of my own (its inactive though, its rarely updated because of school). Photography, videos, etc. are the sort of content ill be posting!

I’m wondering if livejournal and blogger allow you to customise alot of the content like freewebs. But of course they are blog based, so i was wondering about the ups and downs of these hosts.

Answers would obviously be great, thanks ;D!
umm… yes im using the free hosts?
blogging doesn’t necessarily need to be a bought url.
if i use free webs im going to either use shorturl or dot.tk to shorten it.