Here you can find out about 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 socks, 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] 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 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 shopaholic and am often broke, but even if I’m not, I want bargains or prefer to have something for free.
People don’t like to pay too much for things that could be cheaper, right? In the end, it can save 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. Or doesn’t make sense.
So yeah… The moment I got sick of my .tk-domain, .be domains were freeeeeee! 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 although this has backfired on me a couple of times. It wasn’t always pleasant. Truth is, I just got so attached to my .be-extension 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, 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 of your e-mail or website extension. It does make sense though, doesn’t it? I assume people come from places if they have a certain extension, too.
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. I will keep my .be because it’s this way 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
I wanted a personal blog, on an independent host and for international [web]friends; so in English. I decided I wanted to get 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. Mind you, this was the sort of construction where you made your site on geocities and had some sort of frame-slash-redirection going on. Oh, early days of website-making.
I think I came up with striped-socks because stripedsocks.tk [without the dash] was already taken. Easy!
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 know!!!] 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 real site with a real blog in 2006. 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 and ’10 I only posted like, three times in the whole year. So, that’s about all you would ever want to know about this site!
