About
Hello and welcome, dear visitor!
My name is Roland and you have come to TheBlackzone.net, the umpteenth incarnation of my personal homepage, which has been around in one place or another since 1997.
I live in the south of Germany in the beautiful landscape of the Allgaeu, an area which is popular for vacations. For a living, I work in IT for a medium sized manufacturing company and, additionally, run my own small business doing some software development and consultancy with an emphasis on open source software. In my spare time I enjoy making music, reading books and riding my bike.
As said, this site is my personal homepage and I maintain it just for fun, without any particular purpose. I use it as playground to try out new things in HTML/CSS and occasionally post stuff about whatever I’m currently tinkering with.
Enjoy your stay!
Contact me
In case you want to contact me, write an email to
roland@theblackzone.net
Other online presence
This site is my only presence on the internet. I do not use any social media sites or services.
About this site
The name “TheBlackzone” (originally just “Blackzone”) dates back to the mid 1990s when I used that name as my nickname in IRC (Internet Relay Chat). At that time I also made my first attempts to create my own homepage and I was looking for a decent name to title it. “Blackzone” became the obvious choice since I was already known by this name to the IRC people.
I hardly remember how I initially came across this name, but I’m pretty sure it had to do with a graphics demo named “BlackZone”, made by a demo group called SquoQuo, which ran on my Acorn home computer in the very early 1990s.
With the dawn of social networks and ready-made blogging platforms, it seemed to become quite old-fashioned to maintain a personal homepage and most people flocked to those services. All of the people I know, who formerly had their own homepages, eventually stopped maintaining them at some point of this development and gave in to the temptations these platforms and services.
I never followed that trend because, for me, the downsides of using such services (just do a quick search on this topic in your favourite search engine) outweigh their advantages. In addition to that, I have always used my sites as a playground to learn HTML/CSS coding, for toying with various designs and for trying out different techniques to maintain the content.
And so I always sticked with the “old-fashioned” way to be present on the web and today I even feel somewhat proud of having been around in this vein since the early days of the internet…
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