Dear Miss Lonelyblogs:

Please help a blogger who lost his way. I have dallied with more than one piece of blogware, shamelessly used a few blog editors, and taken a web host. Do I need blogger absolution or can I learn to live with the situation?

I was seduced. Some pretty blogware wagged its back end at me and my mind numbed. My fingers took over and stroked those keys as if words could be coaxed from them. I admit it. I lost control. Pretty, sexy, amenable to change, she posed prettily with all her 3 columns of goodness just running over. Now she has become teasingly difficult, hard to handle, prone to tantrums, stubborn and, I fear, slower and fatter than I would have liked. There is still something about her I love but blogging with her has its drawbacks.

The foreplay to this tragic tale of being drawn like a moth to the gentle, embracing light of the computer display is that first rush of pride that the words people read, the pictures they look at, the thoughts and feelings exposed are the self-caress of my psyche. The hidden exhibitionist cries, “Look at me, world.” WordPress took me away with her into the depths of blogospherical depravity. What would I not do for a sweet, pretty, amenable, friendly and all-embracing blog system to expose for the world to see?

Blogging caught me up with my first computer a few years ago. Like my past life where newspapers, magazines, annual reports and books published my work; blogging seemed like self-publishing. Is a web log vanity-publishing or just vanity? I push “publish” therefore I am published. Or is it just another self-caress brought to us by the magic of the Internet?

I lived with Blogger for years and played around with more than one Blogger Blog and Blogger Betas searingly hot off the press. I tweaked them and pimped them, asked much and they returned my lusty exhibitionism with placid restraint and engaging loyalty.

Oh, Miss Lonelyblogs, I did not give them the respect they deserved. So now I keep some Blogger blogs in a harem. Am I a bigamist or blogamist?

It was this year with more time and less money that I decided to plunge into a morass of web hosts and Content Management Systems — even Blogware Platforms. One would be my very own. I wanted, thought I, a space of my own in the great Web, a place under my control and my design. I looked around, visited the dens of iniquity called WordPress, Movable Type, Serendipity , Mambo and yet more. I wandered the proffered offerings of Laughing Squid, PowWeb, Blue Host and ItsaMac and looked at the pretty front of SquareSpace which is no square.