Myspace style website portal

I am not an expert :( BUT feel free to ask whatever questions you have directly here :)

If you just wanna play with Drupal a bit, you can get Drupal hosting from someone which I believe is typically $5/month. I was thinking to provide it myself:
http://www.turnkeycompanies.co.uk/webdesign
but still have doubts whether it's worth it or not. In your case, you would probably need to have shell & FTP access to enable you to develop your own site.

in the downloads area of drupal.org using the download tab at the top of every page of drupal.org.

>> 1) Is it so ? Are you doing it at the right place ? It works for me.

>> 2) You can show photo of who posted the blogs ( and etc etc thereof ) by views.
If you have installed views and views ui, and activated them via modules, and granted access via access control, then you can click on the import tab of views :
and copy paste the following to get a cool recent bloggers page.
* do not use opening and closing php tags *

Best regards

  $view = new stdClass();
  $view->name = 'blogs_recent';
  $view->description = 'Display recent blogs block';
  $view->access = array (
);
  $view->view_args_php = '';
  $view->page = TRUE;
  $view->page_title = '';
  $view->page_header = '';
  $view->page_header_format = '1';
  $view->page_footer = '';
  $view->page_footer_format = '1';
  $view->page_empty = '';
  $view->page_empty_format = '1';
  $view->page_type = 'table';
  $view->url = 'bb';
  $view->use_pager = TRUE;
  $view->nodes_per_page = '10';
  $view->block = TRUE;
  $view->block_title = 'Current blogs';
  $view->block_header = '';
  $view->block_header_format = '1';
  $view->block_footer = '';
  $view->block_footer_format = '1';
  $view->block_empty = '';
  $view->block_empty_format = '1';
  $view->block_type = 'table';
  $view->nodes_per_block = '5';
  $view->block_more = TRUE;
  $view->block_use_page_header = FALSE;
  $view->block_use_page_footer = FALSE;
  $view->block_use_page_empty = FALSE;
  $view->sort = array (
    array (
      'tablename' => 'node',
      'field' => 'created',
      'sortorder' => 'DESC',
      'options' => 'normal',
    ),
  );
  $view->argument = array (
  );
  $view->field = array (
    array (
      'tablename' => 'node',
      'field' => 'title',
      'label' => '',
      'handler' => 'views_handler_field_nodelink',
      'options' => 'link',
    ),
    array (
      'tablename' => 'node',
      'field' => 'created',
      'label' => '',
      'handler' => 'views_handler_field_since',
    ),
    array (
      'tablename' => 'users',
      'field' => 'uid',
      'label' => '',
    ),
  );
  $view->filter = array (
    array (
      'tablename' => 'node',
      'field' => 'type',
      'operator' => 'NOR',
      'options' => '',
      'value' => array (
  0 => 'book',
  1 => 'content_alochona',
  2 => 'event',
  3 => 'forum',
  4 => 'image',
  5 => 'og',
  6 => 'page',
  7 => 'story',
),
    ),
    array (
      'tablename' => 'node',
      'field' => 'status',
      'operator' => '=',
      'options' => '',
      'value' => '1',
    ),
  );
  $view->exposed_filter = array (
  );
  $view->requires = array(node, users);
  $views[$view->name] = $view;