Head Tale

It’s pretty hard to believe but today marks the 4000th post this blog since I started it over a decade ago on February 25, 2006, a couple months after starting the Masters of Library Science program at the University of Western Ontario.

I had always been into computers and technology from banging out programs in BASIC on a Commodore 64 in grade six to our family buying its first 386 computer back in the mid-1980’s sometime to my first job after graduating from University with an English degree (not always in evidence on this blog, I know!) which was designing a “Virtual Book Festival” web site for the Sask Publishers group (this was my “day job” but since, in those early Internet days, if you could get some text and a picture to show up on the web, you were a “webmaster”, I stuck the tag “Designed by Jason Hammond, Head Tale Productions” on that page.  This was maybe my first use of the “Head Tale” moniker but not my last as I had as short-lived web design company specializing in cultural non-profits and book publishers and continue to use Head Tale as my internet handle on a variety of sites to this day.)

Creating this blog was a natural extension of my ongoing desire to learn about and try new technologies.

I knew the MLIS program was already going to have a strong focus on various aspects of technology and I also knew I would be structuring my program in that direction even more – taking classes about technology and web design and writing papers in my other classes where I could find a way to give assignments a techno-focus – Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, etc.

Creating a blog, which at the time was a free service provided by the company that was hosting my personal web site (the precursor of this blog) gave me a way to play around with another newish technology, it (unintentionally) raised my profile within the school, it created an archive of information that still (!) gets used by potential MLIS students to this day and of course, it allowed family and friends back in Saskatchewan to follow our Ontario (and beyond) adventures.

Inspired by a former co-worker who had her own blog, early on, I made a decision to try to do daily (or close to daily) posts – even if only to a YouTube video or a picture – to force myself to keep writing on a regular basis.  (That former co-worker also freaked me out when she posted a comment after I linked to her in my initial post.  I didn’t know about Trackbacks and Pingbacks where blogs know when they’re linked to externally.  So she posted a comment on my first blog post before I’d even publicized it anywhere!)

The analogy I use to describe how my blog fits into the wider world wide web is that, unlike Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and other similar sites which are like busy cities with big crowds, lots of noise and even more blinking ads, this blog is my little acreage, far off in the country, where I can sit on my porch and observe the world going by, mostly quietly and without too much fuss.

Here’s to 4000 more!