I was torn about whether to put today’s post in the personal files or the food files.

To appease those of you who don’t care what I eat (namely the person photobombing me below), I played it safe. So check out today’s donuts4dinner post for a fun food truck outing!

I’ve somehow managed to make for myself a life that entirely overwhelms me, and all I want to do is make it worse by starting more blogs, making more friends, doing more things, taking more photos.

And it’s like the more that goes on, the more overwhelmed I get by it. If a blog post of mine gets more than about 4 comments, I greedily read through them, licking my lips lecherously, and then just mark the WordPress e-mails as unread until I have a chance to respond to them. Or, like, if I get an e-mail with more than two sentences in it, I lustily consume it, congratulate myself for having such awesome friends, and then don’t reply to it for weeks. Which is how I end up with an inbox that looks like this:

But hey, at least I’m keeping up with my spam folder!

The worst part is that I totally, totally crave constant contact. (I imagine this is a product of leaving all of my friends and family behind three states away and having this ludicrous fear of ending up on the streets because I don’t know enough people here to convince someone to take me in when I inevitably lose my job/apartment/boyfriend through total fault of my own, because homeless people must get that way somehow.) But if I don’t reply to people’s comments/e-mails/texts/phone calls, they’ll stop bothering, so it’s all a big catch-22.

And that’s just my way of explaining that despite a month-long lapse, I updated Lost and Lonely Leftovers finally. So go look at it, subscribe to it, and understand that I am actually going to update it regularly this time, I swear. As long as you send me pictures, I mean, because I only have, like, twenty-five of them in my backlog.

People ask me all of the time how I decided on WordPress as my blog provider and which provider I think is right for them, so I thought I’d more or less copy and paste the response I sent to a friend the other day who wondered if she should get a blog or stick to posting on Facebook.

Facebook: First, I think you have to decide if you want to do the little bit of work it takes to get a blog going. With Facebook, your audience is built-in; to get them to read your updates and notes, you don’t have to do anything except have not beaten them up in high school. The tradeoff is that since most people have protected profiles on Facebook, there’s no chance someone’s going to stumble onto you while searching for glory holes (the #1 search term used to find me) and forward your stuff to their friends in the publishing biz. With a blog, you have to get people to look at your posts. Unless you’re already super-famous or just really, really good-looking, people are going to need a reason to follow you. You have to comment on their blogs to get your name out there and then keep writing great stuff that will get them to return.

I also think how much you plan to post is important. If you really think you’re into posting for the long haul, then definitely go for a blog. But a lot of people seem to wimp out pretty quickly or only post a couple of times a month, which I think is more appropriate for Facebook.

Tumblr: If you just want to post a photo or one snappy paragraph and don’t mind possibly feeling like you’re talking to a void, Tumblr is for you. It’s awesome for beginners because the interface is so easy to get the hang of, and the “like” function on each post makes it so people can let you know they dig your stuff without having to think of an actual comment to leave you. The lack of a built-in comment system is a major drawback if you want to actually build community with your readers, though; you’re not going to get to know someone personally, as I have with a lot of the bloggers I read, if all of your interactions are just “liking” each other’s posts. And since you have to be a member of Tumblr to do anything but read posts, you’re never going to get any “likes” from non-Tumblr-having-people who stumble onto you. It’s great if you want to talk about yourself but don’t want to bother with getting feedback.

WordPress.org: For me, conversation is sort of the point of this, so being able to receive comments and reply to them is an absolute must for me. I went with WordPress.org because it’s extremely customizable, and someone out there is making a WordPress plugin for absolutely anything you want your blog to do. The fact that you get an e-mail every time someone replies to one of your comments or that you see a list of related posts from my blog at the end of each of my posts or that I can create a simple poll on IS IT PEE-PEE? is thanks to a free plugin someone wrote. The drawback is that you have to pay a company to host the server you store your blog on, and it’s a little expensive if you won’t be making any money on the blog.

Blogger: So if you want comments but don’t want to spend anything, Blogger is great. They have tons of layout options, the comment system is built in, and they have a Google Connect feature that makes it easy for you to follow other people’s blogs and for them to follow you while still allowing non-Blogger-users to comment on your posts. It doesn’t have nearly the plugin library that WordPress.org does, but there are a couple of free Blogger add-ins that make it possible for you to reply to comments and for the commenter to get an e-mail with your reply so they can come back and continue the conversation. My best friend and I use Intense Debate for that, which you can see in action on our low-carb blog, UNBREADED, at the bottom of any post. I don’t see any drawbacks to Blogger once you install something like Intense Debate; without it, I’m annoyed by the fact that you have to post a new comment in order to reply to someone else’s, which doesn’t ensure that they’ll ever see it.

WordPress.com: This is the free version of WordPress.org that needs no additional setup nor server space on your end. Intense Debate isn’t available for it yet, it doesn’t have the Google Connect community-building of Blogger, and only a handful of customization options are available until you upgrade to a paid account. The only upside to using it that I can see is that its user interface is better-looking than Blogger’s.

So to sum it all up, my advice is:
• Tumblr for lazy egoists.
• WordPress.org for OCD chatterboxes who are really, really into blogging, maybe even professionally.
• Blogger for everyone else!