After carecom.de and bestes-wetter.de, the third site in the CARECOM family is now online: 3d-playground.de isn't about my profession or about clients, but about a hobby of mine – 3D design and 3D printing. The claim says it all: „Designed it, printed it."
What it's about
3D printing fascinates me because it turns a concrete need into a tangible object in next to no time: a spare part you can't buy any more; a little helper for the kitchen or bath; a gift, a piece of a toy. On 3d-playground.de I share projects like these – sorted by area such as kitchen, bath, household, garden, gifts and spare parts – and usually with the full, commented source to rebuild them.
Built, not sculpted
The part I find most exciting – and the bridge back to this site here: I don't design my objects with a mouse, but as a program. OpenSCAD describes a solid through commands like cube, cylinder and sphere that can be moved, rotated, combined and subtracted from one another. Dimensions sit as variables at the top of the code – a different hole spacing, a different wall thickness? Change one number, re-render, done. The same developer reflex as in my day job – parameterisation, reuse, clean source – just in plastic instead of C#.
Two domains, one infrastructure
Technically the site deliberately joins the family while showing something new. It is bilingual, but unlike its siblings each language lives on its own domain: the German version canonically on 3d-spielplatz.de, the English one on 3d-playground.de. Both run on the same application; depending on the domain it serves the matching language, sets the correct canonical and hreflang signals, and consolidates diverging spellings (with/without www, swapped language paths) via permanent redirects to the right address. So Google and visitors see the German and English versions as equal siblings rather than duplicate content – and each language has its own clean brand name.
Underneath sits the same foundation as the sister sites: a Blazor Web App on .NET, server-side pre-rendered, with the shared component library (multi-language, the SEO toolkit with sitemap, cookie banner, mail delivery). Content is thought of as data – each article a Markdown text next to slim XML metadata – so writing stays close to plain text while the result remains structured.
A hobby – and a monetization experiment
One point I want to address openly: 3d-playground.de isn't only meant to share a hobby, it should eventually pay for itself. That is funded through two channels – affiliate links to retailers and, in time, classic display ads. Both are clearly marked in the layout, and your price doesn't change because of them. I only recommend materials and tools I use myself or would have deliberately chosen; I name drawbacks as openly as the benefits. In that sense the site is also an honest little experiment for me: can a niche hobby be monetised cleanly, transparently and without annoying intrusiveness? The answer is still out – the attempt has begun.
Come and have a look
It's best experienced first-hand, of course. If you fancy 3D printing, OpenSCAD and small everyday solutions to rebuild, you're warmly welcome on 3d-playground.de (or 3d-spielplatz.de in German). And if you'd like to know how something like this – from multi-language to the domain strategy to monetization – could be built for your own project: that's exactly what CARECOM Consulting is for.