Noobie-3 weeks old-blog backside help!

Hello, Im a noobie to web design(xhtml, css, etc.) I've read a couple of books and have decided to build a private blog to try and solidify the things I have learned...Im in over my head. The functions of this blog: to be able to upload pictures with comment or caption options, login w/password. thats about it. Im looking for mainly the code for the upload(and processing of upload for viewing.) and login/password. Do i use php, ajax, something else? I dont know. I've been stumbling around the web for a few days not really knowing what im looking for.(noobie) If anyone would like to help this ignorant child, it would be greatly appreciated.

You're doing too much to start. You can do this, but you'll need to take it one step at a time. Perhaps for now the best project is something simpler, then you can get back to this later. Of course you can keep working on it, but it will be slow because a lot of what you're describing is complex.

You should look into the basics of what a serverside language is and what a clientside language is. That will help you to figure out what to use.

Ajax and Javascript are (almost?) never required. For some things (form processing, uploads, databases, etc.) serverside scripts are required.

For what you are describing, PHP (maybe a database) and HTML (plus CSS) are all you need. You may want to use more to expand it, such as with Ajax, but only rarely is Ajax used for "basic" websites.

I think this will help:
http://dynamicdrive.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25847