Monday 1 March 2004

Pic of the day: An electronic spider net? Quantum entanglements? Actually a screen effect from Windows Media Player, but good enough.

My tangled Web empire

Fate conspires against me; or perhaps in favor of me. I did not mean for this to happen, and yet it did.

***

Back when the Chaos Node was still young, I had much less Web space than today. Or at least that is what I believe, it's been a while. I thought I had only 10MB of Web space, or was that 5MB? No, I think it was 10. Anyway, after a while I began to worry that my site would run full. As my good luck would have it, the owner of dvmud.net offered to host my Daggerfall Crossroads for free, which was much appreciated.

After a while, I realized that "outsourcing" my Daggerfall pages would not be enough, as I kept adding to my site every day. Then I found a free Web host, crosswinds.net. Lots of space, free and no advertising on the pages. It was almost too good to be true. But I kept watching it for a time, and then I moved my archive there, under the name "diary farm". All was well for a time, but then the site policy started to slowly change. Pop-up ads were, well, added. FTP was reserved for paid accounts, and then the crashes became more and more numerous. For some reason, these crashes wiped the user's accounts clean of all content, and backup was of course only available for the paid accounts... It certainly seemed like an attempt to get rid of the free users, and eventually they succeeded. My wrist simply cannot tolerate several thousand mouse gestures at random intervals.

I was lucky to find Dreamwater.net, which was still free, had moderate and decent advertisements at the top of the pages, and offered 50MB of storage. I enjoyed my stay there. But then for some reason they decided to discontinue Dreamwater.net but offer the same service at Dreamwater.org. So I had to upload all those years once more. This time I bought (for a onetime fee) a multi-file uploader. Even so, I did not bother to upload everything, just each month as I passed through it. For instance in July I uploaded the July one year ago, the July two years ago, three years ago and so on. The reason for this behavior was my suspicion that something would go wrong within a year. This also came to pass. Last December Dreamwater was hacked. To their credit, they restored the accounts and the contents. However, by Web space was now reduced from 50MB to 10MB. The customer support forum was gone along with all contact information. It is now March and I still cannot reach Dreamwater to ask for more Web space. (Nor do I know whether they would grant it any more. The world has not exactly rewarded their trust.)

I am currently linking to my year ago entries on online.no, my Internet service provider. But this is almost full, even without the fiction and other hobby pages. So I am once again looking for more Web space, preferably free of course (as long as there is no indecent advertising).

I am happy to say that Daggerfall Crossroads was saved by a fellow Daggerfall enthusiast and can now be found on www.svatopluk.com/xroads. But my novel in progress, DarkEyes, is left unfinished and I cannot even post an apology. OK, it is not as if I have actually finished the novel anyway, and I have no idea when that will happen. Probably not until I am current with the journal, at the very least. I also have a comic I'm working on (don't we all?) But in practice I prefer to play my favorite computer games when I have the time.

***

Anyway, a funny thing happens. You see, the most successful search engine today is Google. It ranks sites based on how often they are linked to, how relevant those links are, and the rank of the sites that contain those links. I suppose this means that the extensive cross-linking between my pages, scattered around the Net, pushes me higher on their ranking list than I deserve.

Well, I can't say for sure that this is so. Perhaps Google has some kind of protection against this. But my Net presence is definitely pretty strong, as seen from the fact that my humble self currently holds the top position for both "Chaos Node" and "Diary Farm". And chaos nodes are well known by network administrators, I would believe, as well as a mainstay of the strategy game "Master of Magic", which still has a "cult" following. "Diary farm" is a common mis-spelling of dairy farm. I'm even the world's most famous Itland, according to the tangled Web I weave...