Every December 27th for the past several years, I have spent the day reflecting on the past year, what went wrong, what went right, and what I was going to do about it, creating a sort of “state of Kyle Vanderburg.”
But that's not what's going to happen this year. Starting this year, my focus will be less concerned with where I've been, and more concerned with outlining where I'm going. And it will chiefly be concerned with my professional life and NoteForge than with my personal life. So let's get started.
Operations in 2011 were focused on a few large ideas. First was putting out the fires from 2010. 2010 was a weird year, and efforts were made throughout this year to fix all of that. Second, and less vague, was simplification. NoteForge's website got a makeover, I let go of some domain names (such as Vandermusik and vdbg.us), and I worked toward unifying the NoteForge-created technology. This simplification idea led to the idea of streamlining as much of the NoteForge operations as possible, allowing for more time to do what I'm supposed to: Write music. With that in mind I wrote (and then re-wrote) SPADE, the Score and Parts Automated Download Engine, and conceived and produced HOE, the Hammer Opportunity Engine.
So as things stand, I have a self-hosted, multiuser, robust composer management system built to
streamline submissions to calls for scores (HOE),
Automate the delivery of digital scores (SPADE),
Sell products,
Keep the website and calendar updated,
And it's all based on proprietary NoteForge technology, running on a custom-configured modular server instance named Anvil.
I have a highly brandable company that isn't locked into music publishing (Ex, it's not named “NoteForge Publishing).
I have the very beginnings of a recording studio.
I have the infrastructure to run all of this.
And I have a catalog of works.
So where do we go in 2012? Here's what I'm thinking:
Continue developing Hammer-Based technology.
Anvil will require system updates (Apache, MySQL, PHP), which will be installed in March, July, and November. Also, I will be investigating the move to a different server platform.
Hammer, HIT, HammerSP, and others will continue to be developed. Immediate plans for Hammer include a bug reporting engine, with invoicing and other functions to be determined. These upgrades and cosmetic updates will be released in Hammer 2.2.
I'll be partnering with Jennifer Tripi, and we will be coding a music-teacher specific integration of Hammer named Keys, which will be based on a fork of Hammer 2.1. Methods for licensing this technology will be explored, but currently the technology is covered under VBIPA.
Renew domain names and revise usage.
By the end of 2012, NoteForge domains should be primary domains, and KyleVanderburg domains should be used for branding purposes. Current URL shorteners, the NoteForge CDN, Analytics, etc. are based at kylev.net. These will need to be moved to ntfg.co.
The majority of my domain names will need to be renewed this year, with the following dates:
KyleVanderburg.Net 2/24/12
NoteForge.Com 7/7/12
KyleV.Net 6/9/12
Vandromeda.Com 10/21/12
Ntfg.co 6/1/12
KyleVanderburg.Com 11/1/13
I'll be keeping these six domains for the time being, for branding purposes. Vandromeda is currently unused. Perhaps the KV names should be on odd years and NF names should be on even years.
Move away from Google/Reevaluate the NoteForge Email System
NoteForge/KV.net currently use Google Apps for mail purposes. I'd prefer to move to an exchange server or to a self-hosted solution. This will likely involve moving to Office365, Microsoft's hosted solution.
For the time being, KyleVanderburg.Net serves as the primary mail domain. I'd like to change this to NoteForge.
Shift current cloud services to Windows Azure, and shift more of NoteForge's data to the cloud.
Currently, I use Amazon AWS as storage for various files (personal archives, QUART files, sound backups, Anvil backups). To achieve platform unity, this information will be moved from AWS to Azure.
NoteForge Hosted sites currently use AWS as asset storage. This will need to be changed.
Eventually, via the NoteForge Stovepipe project, selected Hammer/Anvil functions will be moved to Azure.
So that’s the plan for 2012. Let’s do this.
