Contributors to the site’s “Opinions” page, like good friends everywhere, have mixed feelings about Andy’s defection, which occurred in 1987, while Martha was on the road promoting “Martha Stewart Weddings,” the preface to which offered a possibly prescient view of her own 1961 wedding. “I was a naïve nineteen-year-old, still a student at Barnard, and Andy was beginning Yale Law School, so it seemed appropriate to be married in St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia in an Episcopalian service, mainly because we didn’t have anyplace else to go,” she wrote, and included a photograph showing the wedding dress she and her mother had made of embroidered Swiss organdy bought on West Thirty-eighth Street. On-line, the relative cases of “Martha” and of “Andy” and even of “Alexis,” who originally took her mother’s side in the divorce, get debated with startling familiarity. “BTW, I don’t blame Andy,” one contributor offers. “I think he took all he could. I think it’s too bad that Alexis felt she had to choose.” Another contributor, another view: “I work fifty hours a week and admit sometimes I don’t have time to ‘be all that I can be’ but when Martha started out she was doing this part-time and raising Alexis and making a home for that schmuck Andy (I bet he is sorry he ever left her).”

Although “The UNOFFICIAL Site!” is just that, unofficial, “not affiliated with Martha Stewart, her agents, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, LLC or any other Martha Stewart Enterprises,” its fairly lighthearted approach to its subject’s protean competence (“What can’t Martha do? According to Martha herself, ‘Hang-gliding, and I hate shopping for clothes’ ”) should in no way be construed as disloyalty to Martha’s objectives, which are, as the prospectus prepared for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia’s initial public offering last October explained, “to provide our original ‘how-to’ content and information to as many consumers as possible” and “to turn our consumers into ‘doers’ by offering them the information and products they need for do-it-yourself ingenuity ‘the Martha Stewart way.’ ” The creators and users of “The UNOFFICIAL Site!” clearly maintain a special relationship with the subject at hand, as do the creators and users of other unofficial or self-invented sites crafted in the same spirit: “My Martha Stewart Page,” say, or “Gothic Martha Stewart,” which advises teen-agers living at home on how they can “goth up” their rooms without freaking their parents (“First of all, don’t paint everything black”) by taking their cues from Martha.