AUSTIN, Texas, Apr. 30, 2006 — Posting online at all has some pros and cons. Pros: you meet weird strangers who read your writing, you have a record for yourself of what you had to say (publicly) about your life which you can even use online search engines to find, old friends can catch up with you, you have that feeling of being published (and no one can stop you). Cons? You meet weird strangers who read your writing, you have a public record of the stupid things you said about your life, old friends can catch up with you without revealing anything of themselves and you catch that whiff of vanity in vanity publishing.

But just assuming you are going to pour stuff

into the WWW tsunami, what are the pros and cons of using a blogging tool or hammering out HTML in your own private space?

You have total control in your own space. The tools give you some customization choices but they are a little tedious, it seems to me. If I want to add little navigation tools, change stuff, have illustrations appear a certain way on my own HTML I can do it after a certain amount of effort and with the assistance of a good HTML editor.

But creating a free space for yourself at a place like blogger.com has some great advantages. You can blog away from any WEB browser and not worry about archives, dates and times, photo editing, comment management. It's definitely easier if not as flexible.

So...will Visible Woman drift inexorably to visiblewoman.blogspot.com? Will it just disappear? Don't know. But I just thought I'd check in here and think out loud about it a little.