S P L A S H ?
I shall hereby list the reasons why this domain has a splash page, especially those who are curious about this issue.
I have a few restrictions when it comes to mantaining this site. The most important issue being the fact that I don't wish for my main webjournal to be listed in search engines due to personal privacy.
At this point in time, I know of several offline friends who google for my webjournal entries on a regular basis. However, I wish to keep my webjournal private.
Additionally, considering the wide range of topics that I write about, practically any keyword would bring up my domain as one of the search results. I do not wish to clutter well-known search engines like Google with my webjournal entries, causing viewers to stumble upon useless weblog entries which are irrelevant to what they've been searching for in the first place.
Thirdly, having a listed webjournal increases the likelihood of spam, as pagerank is the root cause of the comment and guestbook spam issue that many webmasters are experiencing lately. Hence, it is necessary that I keep my entire webjournal unlisted on any search engine.
Therefore, my webjournal and its entry pages have a pagerank of 0 since they've been prevented from being listed in major search engines, while only the splash page is listed. Although I have plentiful of anti-spam plugins activated on my domain, it is best to have an additional barrier to counter this problem.
I could have a robots.txt file. But first of all, do Spambots heed to the instructions on the robots.txt file? The answer is no. Neither do some search engines obey robots.txt file. One prime example is the Gigablast Spider.
Should I set the webjournal as the default page which loads when little-wonder.net is accessed, the "nofollow" attribute in my webjournal's META tag would cause the entire domain, little-wonder.net to be removed entirely from all search engines, which would cause this site to lose some publicity.
Hence, a splash file (without the 'nofollow' META tag) has been put up as the default loading page to ensure a space on the search engines for little-wonder.net, and still keeping my webjournal hidden at the same time.
Having a splash file is the only way which I can solve my domain predicament. Much as I don't wish for the splash to be there as a hindrance, I am left with no other choice, unless anyone out there is able to come up with alternative solutions.