I don’t know what it is about the internet that makes a person think that anyone cares what they have to say. It just does. I believe I first went online in 1994 or so, while I was in college. And I discovered the chatroom. There wasn’t a whole lot to do back then and it took forever but there were communities and in those communities, we let everyone know what we thought about … whatever.
As soon as I could figure out how, I made my presence on the web. I had a Geocities page – I believe it was geocities.com/vienna/strasse/9933 or something like that. You could choose your location in the “world” and your “neighborhood”. I created a page that listed things that I liked. And links to … sites I liked. And sometimes wrote stuff. And added animated gifs of dancing penguins and stuff. It was pretty lame and lots of things blinked but it was also the coolest.
Not long after, I wanted to figure out how to better customize things, so I started to reverse engineer the html from the source code of websites that looked good. I figured it out. Mostly. And created my own site from the ground up. I was pretty proud of this. This hobby of figuring out how to code by looking at other sites and experimenting went on for a solid 15 years. Ok, I still do it.
When MySpace came along and everyone thought it was so cool to add some extra code to make your page look horrible (historically speaking), I laughed at their noob-eté. But it was different. Now people really interacted online This was sort of like chat rooms, but sort of like home pages. All together. Ok, it was kind of amazing.
In the next step of my history online, I began my first professional blog “Sound Education”. This was about Music Education (I’m a band and choir director). I had a WordPress blog hosted on my own domain. I ended up getting visitors from 6 continents and recognition from the likes of the Music Educator’s National Conference and SoundTree Electronics. But primarily, it was a solid way for me to work out my thoughts and share my experiences (in a fairly isolated field) with others in my profession.
But I got busy with my real job and it died away. I revamped it a few years later as SoundEd.us (SoundEducation was taken and I kind of liked the play on words). I never really wrote that much and it faded again.
I’m now reinitiating SoundEd with this blog at SoundEd.us/blog and my personal site at the core domain. I’ll definitely repost some of my favorite posts from the past, but will also be writing about other topics. Anything relating to education or that which can be heard. That’s wide open to my own interpretation so expect to see posts about my 1970 MGB gt; my thoughts on philosophy, economics, or folk music; as well as my Scottish Collie Sophie. And of course, there will be posts about music education.
It’s a new direction for my self expression. It’s really mostly for me – to allow me to work out my thoughts about things and clear my mind. But you are very welcome to join me on this journey!
