Heads Up: I’ll Be Less Accessible the Next Couple of Days

[peter]

Just a very small personal note. We have a health crisis in my immediate family, so I’ll have limited access to the site today and possibly the rest of the week. Please keep posting deals, sharing and enjoying the site and if anyone wants me just tag me in your post or send me a PM and I’ll get back to you within a day or so. Heck, it may result on me spending more time here. This is my passion project and I really enjoy all of you and am eager to roll this site out, which I could easily do this week technically l, I just want to do it during a week where I can dedicate a lot of time to the site. But everything is in place beyond testing the registration form itself.

Thanks again for being a part of LinkedMusicians. This community is for all of us and it is all of our unique personalities (and quirks — self included!) that make it really special.

– Peter

 

• This topic was modified 1 year ago by peter.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

44

[jorge]

My best wishes for you and your family.

I hope everything goes well.

Jorge

Computer scientist by profession, and musician as a hobby
https://jorgeserranomusic.com/

1

[joegyork]

Hope all goes well Peter.

1

[peter]

TANGENT POST

This thread isn’t in search; only members can see it. So I’ll share a little of what’s going on in my life. My wife, who has a serious illness, is in the hospital and has a major life-impacting (but not life threatening) health issue. She’s going to need a lot of help getting around and doing basic things. Things are uncertain in our lives right now.

It doesn’t dramatically change anything related to LinkedMusicians, except for this week and my plans to open the site up to public registration.

The biggest challenge for me with regard to this site has been balancing all of my responsibilities on the site with also posting deals. When Larry decided to leave, it set my plans back months because I counted on Larry to post the deals and I would focus on building out the site and everything else going on here. Deals are the content that keeps people coming back to the site and spending an average of more than 4 minutes per visit on this site. To be really candid, I don’t enjoy posting deals. I enjoy posting and interacting with people — I love that. I love being helpful. I love maintaining the two freebie sample library lists, because I know that there are people who can’t afford to buy costly sample libraries / instrument plugins, who will find all of these high-quality instruments and it will bring them joy. That drives me to keep working on it. I feel it’s kind of legacy from the son of a (late) music teacher (my eldest sister also taught music). Plus, I love being involved with music, with helping encourage others to enjoy music. It’s an amazing, and great thing in our lives, and it shouldn’t be something always related to how much money you can make from it. It should be more about how much it enriches your life. That is the true return on investment (ROI) of making music. Let’s make this the most helpful, friendliest, and most encouraging music-related community on the web. I’m going to work on growing it after it’s opened up — but frankly, I will always find the greatest measure of success for this site how it does on those three areas more than how many members are in it or even if it can come close to paying for itself. Ever since I started managing digital at companies (1995), consulted to at least a couple hundred companies, launched a successful web publication, and later a dot com that’s now 21 years old, I never did a website just for me, for something I love — beyond a few web pages hidden in my bio site when my son was born 20 years ago. So this site has been my opportunity to have an outlet for my love of making music and can be an outlet and diversion from the daily grind. My heart is in this. Not so much into posting deals — to be really candid, I never wanted to do that, and much more enjoy working on other content or just free form posting. Consequently, posting deals is a chore for me. I have fun working on functionality, coming up with new ideas, new content, new ways of making the community more valuable. Even trying out and maintaining the two lists of free sample libraries. Because I love knowing that someone who may not have the money to buy sample libraries can easily find some really high quality ones here. That’s what drives me. The idea that I can help someone find something that brings them joy.

Anyhow, as usual, I’m going on too long. I’m definitely sleep-deprived and worried about my wife’s health and how my kids are taking this (my son could read this, but he doesn’t; he will be doing a lot of work on the site over summer break from college), and I suppose all of that makes me a bit more heavy at the moment. But I just want to say, I really enjoy having this site. I’m committed to making it something really special, and it’s only showing a glimpse of that right now when it’s still not open to the public. I give my promise that I will not delay that release any more — it will happen next week. We have moderators ready. We have a bunch of helpful volunteers. This community is ready for launch. It just needs me to have A LOT of time to spend those first weeks after launch, because, well, the reality is, all sorts of bad actors will likely attempt to register, from shills for developers to puppet accounts to hackers, and I need to be very hands-on to deal with it and make the adjustments to allow this site to grow and maintain the values and quality standard I believe is critical to this community.

I’ll probably delete this thread later. It’s a huge overshare. It’s way too personal and I don’t want to share these things beyond our group that has been part of all of this. Haha. Dead serious, I’m caught between IRL, being the guy who both can crack everyone up, the guy who intentionally overshares — sometimes for a laugh — and the guy who wants to protect his family’s privacy. The online music forums out there, they’re all about profit. Even the blogs I once really enjoyed like Bedroom Producers Blog and Rekkerd — they’ve gone from being really helpful and passionate to being obsessed with affiliate marketing, product promotion, and just incredibly littered with advertising to the point of destroying the user experience. This site isn’t something I did to make it the ultimate marketing device for developers and manufacturers. I created it to be really helpful and encouraging largely thinking about music-making hobbyists like myself. People who do this for the joy of it. Sure, it can be useful for pros too, but my main focus has been on hobbyists to enrich their lives and help them to avoid influencers and bloggers shilling, pushing products they pretend to be honest reviewers of when they’re really making their livings or decent supplemental income based on how much product they can move. My priority here is helping people and encouraging people to make music and find great tools — regardless if they’re free or paid and never done under false pretenses or even allow anyone to do that on this site.

Hmmm… No charge for the overanalysis! Thanks again for being here, there’s a lot of good things ahead.

– Peter

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

2

[joegyork]

So sorry things are going to be more difficult for you both in future – I am sure you will be a great support to your wife in her new situation.

1

[jorge]

Peter, thank you to express your thoughts.
The family first and the others can wait.

A big big hug

Computer scientist by profession, and musician as a hobby
https://jorgeserranomusic.com/

1

[Author]

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