For all that I write for a living, the idea of writing on my own website without an editor is strange. And yes, this is a website, not a blog. I love the blogosphere which is why I won't enter it. Once you get in there, you can find yourself at the computer six hours later with no idea of how the time passed, and worse, with nothing accomplished.

I wish posters wouldn't fly into rages. I did it myself once, angrily accusing a real jerk of a poster of hiding behind an idiotic username. Suddenly I was being invited to come down to Oregon to meet Bobby F. Pullbaster and get my face broken. It didn't benefit me or Bobby or anyone else trying to keep the thread civilized.

I have not linked to many blogs here either, although I will in the future as readers tell me about the blogs in their own lives they can't live without. Right now I'm just trying to get readers to visit my favourite websites, which have a bigger place in my life than magazines ever did. As sad as it is that print publications are shrinking in circulation and influence, it's true that they largely have themselves to blame. Young people are drawn to the Web. That's the way it is, that's all she wrote, get used to it.

What publication would ever print pictures from the Derelict London site? It's just old buildings, they'd say. No, it's fucking poetry. There, another thing an editor would never let me say.

But I am looking forward to hearing from readers. One of the drawbacks to writing on the very sane CBC.ca website-it's the best in Canada and I'm grateful for its existence-is that I can't respond to readers' letters. The furious guy who wrote to me defending Scarborough and saying that my own neighbourhood was smug and sitting on its utterly unjustified and ludicrous house prices? He was right. But I was never able to tell him that.

I will try to respond to readers' letters as much as possible. Please don't take offence if you don't hear from me. (I myself get seriously annoyed when a response isn't sent instantly, but I used to think the Web was created for speed. It isn't turning out that way. We're human.)

When I wrote for the Globe and had my email address posted at the end of the column, responding to readers filled an entire day. But I don't have a day. I have logs to stack, jail sentences for Conrad Black to study, elaborate Christmas presents for my infinitely loved nieces and stepdaughters to buy and wrap, sugar cookies to ice (when the kids do it, the icing is purple and says "Fat Ass", not funny, girls), that new book on young Stalin to read (he was a tearaway but good fun; no sign that he would one day slaughter tens of millions of his own people) and the British TV critic Charlie Brooker's new collection of columns to read.

"I wish I could write like Charlie Brooker," I moan. "But you can and you do," my husband says. Here's Brooker on why he won't create his own web page: "Somehow I'd rather scrape my own retina off with a car key."

Charlie gets to the point, doesn't he? And I don't. I just write on and on and on.

So I'll stop. Here's the website. I hope you enjoy it.