How it came to this homepage and the domain name.

Gummy bears and flickering screens

It has already been almost three years that I have dealt with the internet technology. I had my own homepage that has been more or less useful, struggled with free webspace providers and their automatically generated advertising banners, annoyed countless innocent fellows with my colourful and animated HTML pages, spent many long hours in front of a still flickering screen to achieve a reasonably acceptable result, changed the hosting provider several times and the internet access even more often and used up about 200 kWh electric power, 3 or 4 short URL redirectors and huge amounts of gummy bears. I think it was about time to stop that and do it right. Therefore also my own domain.

Name search

I’ve been searching for a .de domain for a while before I decided on one. But I did not want to use my first name or surname because nobody can write it correctly the first time anyway. And every name I could think of was already taken. It should be a name that sounds good and is easy to remember, so I took my English dictionary (English is modern, you know) and started picking nice words from the beginning which I could then combine differently. But nothing helped: “Domain already registered.”

Until I came to “unclassified” what oddly makes sense, too: In the past I never really had a topic to handle here. I could never classify my homepage, it has always been an “unclassified homepage”, somewhere between me privately, a bit of entertainment and more recently also some information about telecommunications/internet. Then, in a military context, the word also means “open, not secret” and, well, my homepage isn’t really secret, is it? So that fits quite well. And as this domain was still available – the first one on my search – I registered with 1&1 Puretec webhosting two days later.

Now I am proud owner of my domain since July 2000 and never had legal name or other problems with it. Since then, design and contents on my homepage are constantly evolving… Furthermore, own internet projects are the best way to stay informed and deal with new technologies in a critical and realistic way, also to use and share the acquired knowledge.

After a few years with Germany’s biggest webhoster and not always trouble-free operation, since April 2004 my father and I run a server in the Hetzner data centre on which we offer public hosting and webdesign solutions.

State of the art

This is the eighth version of my homepage, released in June 2011. It features a clearer design and ties my personal homepage stronger with my other websites (web laboratory and photo gallery) again. The separate subdomain for my personal pages has been dropped thereby. The old photo album was terminated and the photos were largely moved to the respective topic pages. Also this is the first version of my personal homepage that is entirely available in English language.

The seventh version of my homepage (released in February 2007) removed many of the old unfinished topics and came with all updated and restructured contents. I particularly cared about my personal photo album. Later there came a separate photo gallery that I assembled with other software components of mine. And finally these pages complied with the common web standards like XHTML, CSS, DOM, Unicode, etc.

In February 2009 I changed the subdomain from home.unclassified.de to me.unclassified.de. I also reworked the page structure and design a bit which leads to a version number of 7.1. Some unneeded pages disappeared and all contents were updated accordingly. Altogether this simplified and cleaned-up edition of the website was relatively long-living already.