Planning

• Choose a topic: How to Choose a Niche Topic for Your Blog
• If you come up with more than one topic: One Blog Many Cateogories Or Many Blogs
• Choose a domain: Choosing the Domain Name for Your Blog
• Find out if the domain is available: Instant Domain Search

Desktop Client

• Install SSH clients: PuTTY and WinSCP for Windows.

Web Server

• Choose a server platform: There are two major options for bloggin platform: to use a free service like Blogger or to have have a hosted service with your own domain. The latter option can be a hosted website, virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated server. With a free service you have only littel control over your blog. Hosted website might be the best options for easy setup and maintainance but in vps is the best option having total control over your server and blogging software with usually reasonable price.
• Order the hosting service: Choosing the hosting service possibly depends if you want to have it in your country or somewhere else. You can start looking options for example with Go Daddy.
• Register the domain: Usually domain registeration is included in the hosting service.
• Install and configure software: Linux, firewall, ntp, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

Blogging Software

• Choose a software: For mainly blogging WordPress is a good choise and for content management system (CMS) there is Drupal. These are both php choises. There are also choises for other paltforms, but for this purpose I would say that php is a agile choise.
• Install and configure the software: WordPress has a good documentation.
• Choose or create the theme for the blog: WordPress Themes
• Start blogging

This is a minimal how to start a blog list. More about them later, but with the list you are ready to go. There are many more things to learn and consider, like writing content, blog networks, search engine optimization (SEO), monetizing blog and so on. Also more about them later.

About topic planning there is not going to be more here for now because, as you can see, ProBlogger is an excellent resourse for that.