2024 is here and I’m sure many of you are wondering what the year has in store for us all, I know I am. I could be running a little late but hoping you all had great holidays, a happy new year and are enjoying the last of what January had to offer in the greater scheme of things.
As usual it’s been a big month for Lipcrack and here’s what’s been going on:
1. If you are wondering what that flame down in the left hand corner of the site is for and feel too nervous to click it, don’t worry, it’s an update which allows site visitors and members to choose their own preference in terms of light or dark online page viewing and also applies to personal blog and messaging services.
2. A mail out to some overseas locations that we’d like to build a regular following with was completed. I keep fairly quite about who we mail and what goes on with it because while they do come out to hear new tracks, there hasn’t been a place to get active with the site which in part is why the texting service was introduced. It’s called social media and we’ve set out to see who gets social.
And I have to say this, while I knew what social media was, in getting the site social media ready, I had to refresh myself on the purpose of social media. Now obviously we all know some of the big names like Facebook and Twitter which are social media sites but in the process I had to go beyond these two organisations and for me the results were fairly surprising. I’ll let people know a couple of points of interest in terms of the research.
1. A lot of organisations that were social media sites have closed down but it’s not really obvious until you research it.
2. Many of those closures were due to things like copyright breaches.
3. Politics plays a significant part in social media.
While that is actually some of the basics of social media, the next area of interest that came up was in building a social media site you need to determine, who you actually want in the community. One of our very first sign ups was a Resume service that posted a link to their site then unsubscribed so basically the site considered that spam and it was deleted, but I did actually like their site.
Probably all I need to say in conclusion on this is, social media sites are a part of a huge network and some of the more unknown ones have more modern dynamics running in them than the conventional sites, I like the Lipcrack messaging service because it doesn’t go over the top, it simplifies community engagement while letting people participate in a clean space environment.
Basically if you want to send a message to a friend you can, if you want to upload a photo library you can and the same with videos. Anyone else you would like to know of these events gets informed by the general message feed if you want them to. The dynamics of this are not limited by your advertising budget so it is also a good place to advertise if you want to.
As far as “Who we want joining it”, the site has always had a music and technology focus but at the same time we want people who are out there enjoying themselves doing their thing, so it’s fairly broad. Obviously there are limits to what is and isn’t appropriate for the site but as yet we haven’t set any other than those regulated by law. I think that’s fairly obvious.
Then of course you have cost management and if you consider the fact that there’s people like Elon Musk out there trying to raise billions of dollars to keep Artificial Intelligence afloat, well we don’t have plans to have robots that talk to you on the site, this is a human to human interaction board. And I’ll have to quickly mention, I will begin re-posting, I’ve just been busy with other gear.
So that’s it on Lipcrack’s “Social Media” plan. Obviously there’s more to it than that, but if you want to drop in and say Hi!, it’s also a great place to do it.
And finally what else has been going on? This might surprise a few people but one of the computers I use for various music tasks, including producing the last few EP’s, had an access issue and nothing worked on it, follow ups with the international brand went nowhere but I did have a reboot stick and finally was able to gain access to it and determine what could and couldn’t be saved due to the operational system being inaccessible. It was actually fairly disappointing. What I have done is spend the last week reformatting it and reinstalling all music software that works on it.
The not so good outcome: currently one of my favourite programs does not work on it, but does on this computer so its probably not a big deal, I’m fairly sure the issue could be resolved however it would probably take a lot longer than needed at this time and I have no doubt the gear that I’ve recently added to it, could achieve the same sound results and if not, well that would just be variation in the next potential EP. I just have to think about it because for the most part a lot of updates in the various programs haven’t been that user friendly and to some extent are dominated by what people are pushing as music trends rather than what you want to produce. And all I know at this point is, if I go out to produce another one, I need to make sure it can complete the task and switching to a different platform doesn’t guarantee that, but I have two back up plans for it, so I know it’s possible but I don’t want it to be more difficult than it needs to be.
The good outcome : The unauthorised admin account has been reset and I’ve gone from a 3 minute boot time to jet plane and sports car icon status via one of the programs I’m using and has varied from 39 seconds to 50 which is about the same as the higher capacity computer I’m working on and require some significant tweaking of software to produce. Obviously I’m super happy about that because the way it ran previously was just too slow for an unknown reason.
And thats it, this update might be a little long in terms of reading but generally it was about continuing to develop what’s in place and making sure it’s all functional to do, which it is.
For now the year’s just starting out, lets see what happens.
Lipcrack