Sennin's Blog

As I wrote earlier, my account at Free-space.net has been suspended. It has been suspended for an unknown reason. I have never violated any of their terms of service, and my website was in no way illegal. It just described various web browsers.

I asked Free-space.net about it, but they never answered any of my questions. No word from them. They just ignored me.

They even may not want my attention anymore, but I never forget them. So I wrote a farewell note to Free-space.net in thanks to their service. It may not be much, but it might amuse you as well as Free-space.net staff in view of the situation. If you are interested in how much they might be amused, just visit Free-space.net.


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Free Web Hosting Services Are Not As Good As Expected (Sennin's Blog)

I have been using a free web hosting for more than a year, but last month I found that I was unable to access my website. I looked into this problem at once, and I learned that my account had been suspended. It was online when I checked it out two weeks before, but somehow the company that runs that web hosting service suspended my account. Of course my website in question is in no way illegal, and I have never violated their terms of service. So I asked them about this problem, but they did not answer my question. This web hosting service is Free space.net. You can read my question there.

I know many free web hosting services have difficulty surviving, but this case is outrageous. It is fine to stop hosting any website that they host on their servers, but at least they should warn its webmaster in advance. They should also answer questions from its users even if they have suspended them.

It is getting ridiculous to rely on such services. I think we all need to register a domain and use it on a free web server or a paid one from now on. If we rely on an unstable service like Free space.net, all the efforts we have made to build a website will be wasted in the end, and we have to do everything all over. We lose all the inbound links. This problem is very serious in an age when search sites control almost all the traffic on the Web.

It costs some money to register a domain, but I think it is worth it, considering the amount of time we need to spend in building a website. If we are to minimize the running cost of a website, we may need to use affiliate programs to cover the cost.

Use of an affiliate program lowers the credibility of a website, and that is a problem we need to think about from now on. However, there seems to be no other way to build a website without spending much money.

So, that is what happened, and my website "Sennin's Shield" moved to the following new URL: Sennin's Shiled.

I have installed a new favicon for this blog. It is just a red circle.

But why a red circle? Someone may ask this question. Well, I have my reasons for that. It is not intended to copy a national flag of some country. It is not too difficult for me to make a favicon like this. I would have to give up a more complex one. The previous favicon looks complex but it was created by a tool from my bigger icon picture, which was also created by a tool. That one took me a whole day, though.

The color was chosen so it would represent the background color of this blog. That is why it is red. It has nothing to do with some red-sun country.

Before installing a new favicon here, I also updated the favicon on Sennin's Shield. That one is also a circle, but it is green in color. It is the same favicon that I started to use for my main website in Japanese yesterday. Also, the favicon used here is the same favicon used for my Japanese blog provided by FC2 blog service.

The old favicon will be used for my personal profile website. The Japanese version of that website exists, but its English version has not been created yet. Please wait or do not wait because it may take years before it is online.

Let's say that the favicons of my websites are getting to look like traffic signals.

Beware. Google does not seem to read and follow "robots.txt" files these days. Yes. I recently found that one of my websites is indexed by Google in spite of the fact that it has a robots.txt that prohibits all search engines from indexing it. I uploaded the robots.txt in July, and it is still in the Google index. I checked out Yahoo! to see how other search engines are doing, and I found that Yahoo! has already excluded that website.

I logged into my Google account to find out what Google is doing, and I learned that Google does seem to recognize the existence of the robots.txt and understand what it says. I wonder why Google has failed to exclude that website from their index. It might be a bug. At least we need to be cautious about Google in this matter.

A Happy New Year!

In Japan we celebrate New Year's Day for three days from January 1 to January 3. But actually the day before New Year's Day is also considered a holiday, so we actually celebrate it for four days.

However, many stores are busy on the last day of the year, and some stores are open on New Years Day and the following two days too. So not everybody is taking a break during this period of the year.

As for me, I am on vacation from December 31 to January 4. But I have a lot of things to do. So I am pretty busy these days. I should be. There are so many things that I need to attend to.

See you.