Why gooblen, with two o’s

The name is not a typo. It is what came out of a negotiation I refused to have.

First, the word

Goblen is the Romanian word for a picture worked in cross stitch - the framed needlework that hangs in a great many Romanian houses, often stitched by a grandmother over a winter. English has no single word that carries the same weight. “Cross-stitch picture” is accurate but flat; “tapestry” suggests something woven rather than stitched. A goblen is the finished thing, the object on the wall, and the years of evenings that went into it.

2021

The project already existed, but it lived only on my computer: a program that took a photograph and produced a cross-stitch chart. To give it a life on the internet I needed a domain, and the obvious one was goblen.ro - the right word, correctly spelled, exactly what this is about.

It was taken. Not by someone who stitches, not by a craft shop, not by anyone doing anything with it - it was parked by a domain reseller, one of those who buy words and wait. He wanted 500 euros for it. For a project that earned nothing and was never going to, that was an absurd price; and beyond the money, paying someone who had built nothing and merely reached a word before me bothered me more than the sum did.

It is still held today, still unused. Five years on, still sitting there.

The extra letter

So I looked for something else, and the idea of one more o arrived: gooblen.ro. It was free, it was easier to remember, it sounded better, and - this part I only worked out afterwards - it says more than the original did.

Because everything this site does comes down to looking closely. You compare the same photograph at 6, at 20 and at 60 colours to see where the face goes. You zoom into the chart until you can tell one symbol from another. You study the simulation before buying the first skein, to find out whether your sky will come out in steps. Two o’s side by side look rather like a pair of eyes. That is not what I had in mind in 2021, but the fit is too good to leave unsaid.

How it turned out

A name nobody confuses with anything else, which cost nothing beyond the ordinary registration fee, and which made nobody rich for having sat on a word. Sometimes the second choice is the better one.

If you arrived here looking for goblen.ro and wondered whether you had mistyped the address: you had not. Two o’s. Try the generator.