I’m happy running my own web software (like hosting my own WordPress stuff such as onelinemoviereviews or full blown CMS stuff like BookThing or forums like the TNT Website, and Wiki’s such as the TNT Wiki), I’m happy writing my own little bits of web software (like the original blogging stuff I wrote over at my earlier site which I won’t link to out of desperate embarrassment over the content), and I’m happy using hosted solutions from other people (like Blogger, or LiveJournal). I constantly vacillate between the options mentally, although I haven’t allowed that to reach the real world since I moved over to Blogger a while back.

With fully hosted services you let someone else worry about the storage, up-time, security and in the case of most of them these days, they’re free. You pay in flexibility. I have whatever features Blogger has, or if I moved to LJ, then whatever features LJ has. When you host your own stuff, you get to worry about the cost and security, but you can throw as many features in as you can find plugins for your various bits of software. When you write your own software, then you really get to worry about security, and if you’re like me you implement 1/10th of what you dreamt of and get bored really quickly.

So I guess I won’t make the mistake of writing my own stuff again, and I’m here to stay with either a hosted service or a self-hosted solution. I like the idea of moving to WordPress self-hosted, but I think I like it because I’m geeky and interested in that sort of thing, and I wonder if it’ll truly enhance, improve or change my blogging experience at all? Maybe I’ll get bored really quickly and want someone else to patch and update the software. Maybe eventually I’ll get tired of paying however much a month I currently pay to host 4 or 5 websites of my own and rue the day I stopped using Blogger. Is Blogger worth sticking with? Should I move back to LiveJournal or consider WordPresses free hosted service? And then of course I realise that I go through blogging spates, like this one, once a year or so and soon it won’t matter because I won’t be writing anything on the blog anyway.

It’s a truly trivial thing to think about, maybe my soft western life is so easy that the only thing I have to be concerned about is how best to feed my vanity through blogging solutions. Maybe it’s an extension of my work and I just like working out the best way to solve computing problems. Maybe I should get out more.

Maybe I’m just pining over the ‘current mood’ option in LiveJournal posts …