Before I work with Drupal, I use Wordpress for all my site. Wordpress is in fact a nice popular script made for personal blogs Drupal's motto is more about the community. What would be the reason using Drupal for personal sites? For me, it's because the taxonomy system in the core relates to the perfect classification system of information. For everyone else, Drupal have high extendibility to match all the needs if you ever want to transform your personal little site into a community (because your band(or drunk) video have over 1 million views on youtube).

To set up a personal site with Drupal, you have to download Drupal, install it, and then add these modules:
Pathauto
Token
Smileys
CCK
Views
Gallery

This article are intended for readers who knows how to:
1. Install Drupal
2. Install Modules and activates them
3. Access the admin panel
If you don't understand 1-3, check the handbook. If the admin panel is too confusing, add the Drupal Administration Menu module

1. The Foundation
After you have created a admin account. Start change the basic information of your site destination (Administer > Site Information)

Activate all the third party modules mentioned in the start and core modules include Blog, Blog API, Path, Ping, Profile, Contact and Upload. destination (Administer > Site building > Modules)
Create a free tagging vocabulary that work on each one of the the contents
destination (Administer > Content management > Categories > Add vocabulary)

2. The about page
Almost every site in the world have a about page. For a personal site, maybe write something about about who you are (Facebook widgets), your interests(Twitter and Delicious) and your debts(NetworthIQ stats).
Drupal came with the content type "Page". destination (Create content > Page)
It's like writing a post for all kind of Drupal pages, it's best to select it as Full HTML.

3. The blog
Drupal have a built in module for blogging. destination (Create content > Blog).

Nice paths
The blog module is simple, it don't even have a neat a URL like http://yoursite.com/2007/12/08/blog-entry-title. The path module is required for nice URLs.
By activating the path module, a new field gets activated, the URL path settings.

If you are a casual blogger, write it yourself isn't a big deal. But if you are lazy or blogging intensively, the pathauto module you activated can do the dirty work for you.
Go to the main configuration to pathauto. destination (Administer > Site configuration > Pathauto)
Nothing much need to be changed, except the Node Path Settings. For blogs, it's best to have url in the yyyy/mm/dd/title format. For pages, just a title is enough.

Submit and it's done. After that, any post created will automatically follows the convention setting in the pathauto module.

Smileys please
You have already activated the smileys module, why isn't there any smiley selection box when you are writing a post? To show smileys box, you have to set it manually.
destination (Administer > Site configuration > Smileys > Settings)

Enable showing smileys box on both nodes and comments

3. Reviews on books/CDs/sites
There are two options to do reviews. Using the book review module, or CCK + Views. Using the previous one can not show the real power of Drupal + CCK + Views. Using CCK + Views can do more than just reviews, other contents are possible.
Create a new content, reviews
First, create a new content type, "reviews". destination (Administer>Content management>Content types>Add content type)
Then, edit the reviews content type, one of the new options from CCK will come up, add field.

Chose add field. Add a new field called ratings, then chose it as text/selected list and create field.

After that, go to the bottom of the page and find allowed text, add some possible values for ratings and submit

Now, a new field will appear in the review content type, and will allow selection of the rating.

View all the reviews
How can reviews get presented? Like all the reviews posted on the website.
Views module is exactly the one to use. destination (Site Building > Views > Add)

Give the view a name

Provide a page view and set the url to access the view. view type is a full node, set the title to anything you want.
Go to filters and set which node will be filtered out and presented to the reader. In this case select Node: Published, Node: Distinct and Node Type as reviews.

Create a sorting criteria, sorting by time posted is reasonable.

Save and create a link to the reviews in the menu. destination (Site Building -> Menus -> Add Menu item)

The reviews are successfully integrated into the site! It can be accessed directly though the menu.

4. Gallery
A personal gallery that show your looks, can be created with CCK and views. But this section will introduce the alternative, the Gallery module, it acts as a bridge, connect Drupal with Gallery, a professional PHP gallery system. For the CCK version, please read the how to page in the handbook.

First of all, install Gallery according to the steps on it's wiki. Install it in a new directory, call it"gallery2" and put it in the Drupal root directory. Remember to activate the image block module for Gallery.
destination (Administer > Site configuration > Gallery settings)
Usually, gallery can configure it self, but in case it doesn't, it will show you all the errors and ways to fix it.

The really nice thing about gallery module is most configuration are already done, include the menu, navigation and such. Only the blocks need to be considered now.

Go to the block configuration page, activate. Gallery Image Block, and Gallery Navigation.

Time to add some photos into the gallery. A link to gallery suppose to be in the menu. When there is no photos, there is a huge link saying "add photos".

adding photos is easy, just go with the instructions

After uploading it, a page will show up with the link to the new photos

Result looks nice :)

5. Contact form
You might have(or more likely haven't) left your contact information in the about page, but there are lazy people who doesn't want to touch the email clients. Built a contact form saves some potential friends :)
destination (Administer > Site building > Contact form > Add category)
Follow the instructions, image below shows a good example

Go to the list of the menus and activate the contact form

The contact form now can be accessed in the menu.