Why “unclassified”?

The domain unclassified.de was the first I registered. It’s still in use for several websites on subdomains.

After three years of internet and homepage experience, grappling with free webspace providers, short URL forwarders and their automatically injected advertising banners, I think it was about time to do it right. With my own domain. But how to name it? I didn’t want to use my own name because nobody can spell it right the first time. It should be a name that sounds good and is easy to remember, but every name I could think of was already taken. So I took my English dictionary (English is modern, you know) and went through it picking nice words to combine. But nothing helped: “Domain already registered.”

Until I came to “unclassified” which oddly even makes sense: Until then my homepage has never had a real topic, I could never classify it. It had always been an “unclassified homepage”, somewhere between me privately, some entertainment and later also some information about telecommunications and the internet. Then, in a military context, the word also means “open, not secret” and, well, my homepage sure isn’t secret, right? So that fitted quite well. And as this domain was still available – the first on my search – I registered with 1&1 Puretec webhosting two days later. That was July 2000, I was a senior in grammar school.

The following years first subdomains were added, then other domains. With the rise of new top-level domains, in 2014 I expanded my online presence to unclassified.software and unclassified.photography. The name “Unclassified” also appears in my software packages and code namespaces. Now I also use an abbreviation of my name for the domain ygoe.de. The even shorter fallow domain yg.de is not being sold to me at a reasonable price, even after years. Unfortunately I hadn’t thought of this when the two-character .de domains were launched in 2009.

After a few years with Germany’s biggest webhoster and not always trouble-free operation, my website now runs on a dedicated server in the Hetzner data centre since April 2004.