Writing · 20 Oct 2026
willem.frl
Boppe Fryslân!
I am half Frisian: my mem, my pake and my beppe come from Fryslân. So when I found out that the .frl domain was still free for my name, I did not have to think long. willem.frl is mine, and it takes you straight to the Frisian edition of this website.
Half Frisian
Fryslân is where I ride the Fietselfstedentocht: 235 km along the eleven cities, with a stamp card in my pocket and the Frisian flag on my gloves. I wrote about my first one in 2017 and about the hottest one, ridden on feel, this spring. In 2024 I rode it on the Brompton, in the rain, with my brother Kevin next to me (the photo at the top). Every time I cross into Fryslân something in me relaxes. The land is flat, the sky is big and the people are direct.
The whole site in Frysk
Since this week willem.com is maintained in Frysk, as the ninth language next to English, Dutch, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Papiamentu. Not with a translate button. Every post, the CV, the FAQ and every interface text, 216 texts and about 210,000 words, were translated by one AI model and then proofread by a second, independent run against the official rules: the Frisian spelling of 2015 (the Steatestavering) and the Foarkarswurdlist of the Fryske Akademy, the preferred word list behind the official spell checker. The checker in my build rejects a text with a broken link, a changed name, a missing heading or a word the dictionary does not know, unless a proofreader explicitly allows it (4,297 words so far, mostly names and technical terms). Hollandisms are the enemy; Frysker.nl, the Fryske Akademy's own tool, is the final read for anything that matters. The texts live as content in my own CMS and the site is rendered as static pages, with hreflang tags so search engines know the nine editions belong together.
The proper way in: willem.frl
Frisians enter this site through willem.frl. That is the proper way. Do it once and the site remembers you: the willem.com logo in the header gets a handwritten .FRL (my own handwriting, drawn with the Apple Pencil) with a heart on the dot, and the Frisian flag waves next to it. The updated professional logo with national branding, you know :D
Friesland too cold? Bon bini, dushi Kòrsou!
For my other friends, some 7,000 km to the south west, the whole site is now in Papiamentu too. Same method, same checks, same number of posts. Warm greetings from a cold country.
Boppe Fryslân
Half of me is Frisian, and now the whole website is. Oant sjen op willem.frl!