Here you can find out a lot of things to do with the history of this domain. I’ve had it for a few years now, and it’s been constantly changing. With ups and downs, yeah, but it’s been fun nonetheless. However, there is a bit of a funny story behind this domain.

Why "striped-socks"?

Haven’t you heard? Striped socks are the Key to Awesomeness!

In all seriousness, back when I came up with this domain, I was obsessed with striped socks. I still am, actually. But back then I used to wear striped socks every day. I had colour coordinated striped socks, I guarantee you. There was never a day without striped socks. Knee high socks, over knee high, ankle socks… As long as they were striped ;)

My e-mail alias was gestreeptesokken because it was nice and random and not boring like name.surname. ["Gestreepte sokken" is Dutch for "striped socks", by the way.] I wanted a site that would go together with that, so I went for gestreeptesokken.tk [and even .nl, for a brief period long after that] but it seems the ‘gestreeptesokken’ domains never wanted to turn into something fun. When I decided to switch to English to cater to more people, I simply translated it.

I know my site has little to do with striped socks. I don’t care, it’s a personal site. I still love striped socks and use it as an alias for several things [deviantart, flickr] and I’ve become really attached to the name. However, I’m still sock-obsessed and try to incorporate my obsession into my site once in a while!

Why .be?

I’m Dutch. The Dutch are known as very greedy but I am known as particularly greedy. That may have something to do with the fact that I’m a student and am always broke, but even if I’m not, I want bargains or prefer to have something for free.

Why? Davey knows. I just know I don’t like to pay too much for things that could be cheaper. So in the end, that saves me a lot of money because I’m like "oh forget it" a lot of times, but it also results in me having a lot of free cheap stuff that isn’t that great in quality. Whatever.

So yeah… I could’ve gotten striped-socks.nl, the moment I got sick of my .tk – but noooo, .be domains were freeeeeee at that moment! And you could get like, oh my Davey, five freeeee .be domains! So of course I did!!

A year went by and I realized I couldn’t keep up five domains so I ditched three of them. Over the years, I’ve changed hosts a couple of times, trying to get the cheapest service possible [parking only, free hosting, etc.] but it has backfired on me a couple of times. It wasn’t always pleasant. Truth is, .be and .nl are still some of the cheapest extensions to get in the Benelux [if you know where to look] and I just got so attached to my .be that I kept it, everytime I moved hosts.

The funniest part is that in the end, I moved my physical self to Belgium! I’m living in Gent, Oost-Vlaanderen, now. It’s funny how people used to ask me if I were Belgian when I wasn’t, just because of my website. Now I’m actually living in Belgium and the Belgians are like "But you’re Dutch!". Haha.

Sometimes it’s a little bit complicated, because my most commonly used e-mail is connected to my more "professional" site, ff-anders.nl. People just automatically assume you’re from some place just because your e-mail ends in the two letters that stand for that place. I’ve had it happen that people thought I lived in Belgium and couldn’t come to their event in the Netherlands. Or people in Belgium assuming the telephone number I e-mailed them was located in the Netherlands because I didn’t give them the entire [country coded] number.

With all that extension confusion, I decided to have my other domains as .com from now on. What if I move to someplace else one day?! I don’t want to change my domains everytime I move, that’s insane. It’s just too bad [and ironic] that I came up with .be that one day.

In the end, the moral of the story is: don’t be cheap. Get an extension that fits. Funnily for me, it fits now. And I will keep my .be because it’s this way now and we’re all used to it [it's been so long! Why change it now?] and it has a funny story. But if you’re like me and don’t want to be stuck in one place, go with the more logical step [who doesn't go for ".com" the minute they're not sure of the exact address?] and pick something like .com.

The history of striped-socks.be

Okay, so now you know why I’m a Dutch girl with a Belgian extension… But before this Belgian extension came a [also free] .tk extension..

I wanted a personal blog, on an independent host and for international [web]friends; so in English. I decided I needed to get rid of my geocities address, I redid that and got the domain from .tk. Though striped-socks.tk never really got off the ground, most of the time it had been an "under construction!" page.

I think I came up with striped-socks because stripedsocks.tk was already taken. I really wanted something to do with striped socks so I went with the dash. Now I like that both my domains have dashes ;)

I can’t really give you exact dates on when I had what, but I used to have a lot of pages on free websites and I really loved blogs on greatestjournal. I had over 70 journals! [I can hear you thinking: why must you be so cheap?! The reason: I was young, I didn't want to pay for "virtual things".] But yeah, for a lot of free online blogs. people need accounts to comment, or to see content, or whatnot. So when grabbing a greatestjournal-blog and pasting it in an iframe [I know] didn’t really work out the way I wanted it to, I got myself a wordpress. A real fancy one with a domain attached and whatnot.

The first year was kind of boring, the second year I posted a LOT but then lost it all again during some databasecrash [I was on a cheap host] and after seven bazillion moves, we’re now here. I don’t think I will move anymore and I hope to be a little bit more active, because in ‘08 and ‘09 I only posted like, three times in the whole year. So, that’s about all you would ever want to know about this site!