<p>The original <a href="http://stats.blogoverflow.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Stats blog was built on wordpress</a>. I also have a personal <em>free</em> wordpress blog that fits all your needs (and I am happy with).</p>

<ul>
<li>pictures (both svg and raster) can be embedded</li>
<li>you can write formulas in Latex and have code blocks, very similar to this site (via a similar type of markdown or edit the html directly). Personally I write posts in markdown, then use Pandoc to covert to html, then just upload the html to the online site.</li>
<li>animated graphs are more tricky - GIFs can be embedded same as images. You can also embed stuff via iframes (self promotion examples, <a href="https://andrewpwheeler.wordpress.com/2017/03/02/scraping-meth-labs-with-python/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">CartoDB animated map</a>, <a href="https://andrewpwheeler.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/much-ado-about-nothing-overinterpreting-volatility-in-homicide-rates/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Han's Rosling moving bubble type graph</a>).</li>
<li>comments, with pretty good spam filtering in my experience</li>
</ul>

<p>I've described mine as a personal nerd journal as well. If I end up doing something a few times I will write a blog post (and it helps me find code/examples faster than searching through old files). </p>

<p>The only thing I did not cover was cyrillic. I'm personally ignorant of this aspect, as well as more general UTF support. It is likely some other platforms meet these same needs. I'm happy with my free wordpress site, it is low maintenance and has the functionality I want. I can't say much about other competitors.</p>
