the domain
MOUSELING.net is, officially, my third domain, and I hope to keep it as my home domain for a long time. (I say officially because I definitely picked up some free bullshit .tk domains when I was like 12 through a random website LOL. I thought it was cool even though I didn't even have a site. Did anyone ever use those, anyway?)
I had kept sites before then, on the free Neocities tier, and then on a free web host that didn't even have SSL, yikes... but I played around with my first domain gravetown.org for a long while and it was my first foray into "real" web hosting, via Nearly Free Speech for the low prices. I then moved to Leprd for the even cheaper (free) price.
I thought it was a cute domain, and it was! But I never even started working on the Leetspeak Monsters fansite I dreamed of and I lost my sense of direction when it came to everything else.
On a whim I bought picopico.org, inspired by the band FLOPPY's old domain, to serve as a network for my fansites and shrines to picopico bands (as well as be my cute email domain). As that's my main passion in life, it just made sense. I archived gravetown.org and immediately moved all my relevant contents over, cooked up a new home page, and I ended up growing a new enthusiasm for HTML.
I told myself I'd put the stuff I archived somewhere else someday, but I never did. I should go digging and pull the good stuff out.
Some months later I realised that I was abusing PHP for things I didn't need it for; I also missed having the sense of community that I used to when it came to my website. Watching people's site updates from the Neocities feed was something I missed very dearly. I also found myself itching to put stuff back on the Internet outside of those fanpages, but with Gravetown gone I had nowhere to put any of it!
All of this led to me idly dreaming of a new domain and a fully personal home page. Of course I'd never managed two fully separate websites at once at this point, so I didn't know what to do. Would I be able to take care of both sites?? (The answer to that has been yes, and I owe that to keeping my goals with both in check. It's been lovely.)
I know that I had MOUSELING in mind for quite a while before I took it. I don't remember exactly how long... but it was definitely floating around in my head. I was tossing up between extensions though: .nu is for cool kids, .com gives a more professional feel, .org is cute but I've worn it out, and so on... Why was I so worried over that?!?!? LOL?
Mice are not my favourite animal (real ones know that I love viscachas more than anything) but they are the ones I connect with the most. There is a reason I'm named Mousecky! So I think that mouseling fits me... I'm a little mouse. I'm friendly and cute... hopefully. That's the feeling I want my website to give off.
Once I landed on MOUSELING.net (because .net is the cutest "standard" TLD, obviously) I designed my first few pages and set up a new Neocities account, then bought Supporter to link everything up and for the more lax limits. That made everything official so I had to maintain the site now!
Up since 2024.11.19 and hoping to keep the same home page for a thousand years to boast about it~ (^_^)