About otherSmallCities

Thank you wanting to know more. Let me start by telling you a little about myself. The reasons for “otherSmallCities” can be found below.

Born in 1980, in Lutherstadt Wittenberg, German “Democratic” Republic, I was baptised in the same church where Martin Luther had ideas. My childhood was spend in Weißenfels, former home to Heinrich Schütz. I grew up in the former Hotel of his father.

While my father was a priest in the cities largest church (link to german wikipedia) and my mother worked for the parish, both were active in the East German opposition (link to an essay in German about their work). Accordingly I joined the opposition on my first day in school, by not joining the young pioneers. In November 1989, I by chance knew the wall had come down before my parents.

From 1990 to 2007 I lived in Berlin, both in the east and west, where I discovered Japanese literature and later music and culture.

After finishing High School as an adult I moved to Yokohama, Japan, where I got married, had kids, divorced then moved to Tokyo and married again.

I will at some point summarise all this in a full autobiography.

As for the name of this endeavour: otherSmallCities — it is a joke of translation.

My name in German is Tautz. If you translate this the Japanese Katakana writing system you will get "taotsu" or 「タオツ」. Since 2008 I had used Kanji to write my name in Japanese, which is also the basis for my logo.

I had been asked to change the Kanji so I chose a new set: 他小都. I cannot guarantee a screenreader would read this correctly. However, I ran these kanji through google translate and got "other small cities". This was funny to me, so I kept it.

One note about the blue beanie. This is the blue beanie from blue beanie day, November 30th. It is an annual celebration of web standards and accessibility.

Since the beginning I had my logo arranged like a stamp. I added the blue beanie on top in 2009 and used it since then as a logo.

So, putting it all together, it looks like this:

Long story short: Accessibility and web standards are always very important.

An accessibility statement will be added soon, but this site should be fully compliant with WCAG 2.2 Level AA and strives for AAA.