During last week I published my podcasting journey to date, five posts, and now I need to start preparing for the Week 6 post.

After a couple of false starts, I have managed to record my first Zoom call. I just assumed that the mic and speaker settings for a Mac would be used by Zoom, not so, you need to navigate in Zoom to Preferences which you can do from the icon in the menu bar if that is available. Obvious really, but with the onset of panic in the previous attempt the obvious doesn’t always present itself. I found the record button and at the end stopped the recording and in due course three files were dropped onto my hard disk, .m4a, .mp4 and a .conf. QuickTime Player can be used for the first two, sound (.m4a) and screen recording + sound (.mp4). The .conf was opened in a text editor but it didn’t contain any useful information. 

I duly got an error message when loading the .m4a into Audacity as Richard predicted in Module 2. At 1 hour 12 minutes I shan’t take the next step and use Auphonic.com to convert to .mp3 I’ll probably be blowing my free minutes for the month before I get a chance to hear the second recording. 

I happen to have Camtasia which is used for screen recording and you can import the .mp4 and save the audio as .wav, which you can then import into Audacity, except the .wav is 7 times larger than the .m4a and presumably it can’t improve the sound recording during these conversions. It seems that Camtasia used to allow export of audio to .mp3, but no longer, shame.

I’ll listen to the recording and give it a critique so that I can learn and adjust. But a small piece that I randomly selected made me chuckle, as I was describing a particularly difficult client situation, but I couldn’t air this unless I wanted to end up in the courts.

I kicked off the replies to Richard’s weekly “Goals for the week”. I had these already prepared ready in the conclusion to My Podcasting Journey – Week 5. 

I’ve started Module 3 of the course which starts by the step-by-step process to configure your WordPress site ready for submitting your podcasts to the big wide world. This is enormously useful and I’m watching a minute of the recording, finding the setting on my site, making the required changes, and then moving on. 

I won’t spoil the fun by repeating things here. But there was one point that needs further investigation and that is the compression of graphic images using ImageOptim, GIMP or possibly something bigger like Lightroom, that I’ve been informed I will need if I’m going to improve the quality of the snaps I’m taking and turn them into real photos.

I concluded these key features for my podcast, which I will provide here for your critical review.

Title	Maximo Bite Size
Subtitle	Short(ish) podcasts on IBM Maximo functional topics brought to you by MaximoSecrets.com
Podcast Topics	Education, Technology, Business
Hosts/Artists/Producer	MaximoSecrets / Andrew Jeffery
Summary	IBM Maximo has a very large functional footprint and over 5+ years and hundreds of articles MaximoSecrets has been diving deep and revealing the hidden secrets of this top performing Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system. Now its author, Andrew Jeffery, with over 25 years of experience with Maximo will provide this knowledge in 10-15 minute episodes with links to the articles he has written so that you can dive deeper. Follow Andrew on his weekly journey with Maximo. Then listen to After Hours, his life and musings away from the world of Maximo – but only if you wish.

In Creating a Podcast Post the title shouldn’t be an issue, and I’ll use the transcript as the description to provide the option for people to read what I’m saying if that is their preference to listening to my dulcet tones. An excerpt and tags should be easy to create. I don’t provide these currently on my blog posts, perhaps I should, what does everyone think? 

I’m not sure that a featured image would work for these podcast posts, if there was one it would be the logo I’ve created for Maximo Bite Size and would hence be the same on episode 1 as it will be on episode 52. Creating a new image every week might add too much to the workload, it is a bit like creating slides for a presentation, the words can be developed in next-to-no-time, then someone whispers in your ear, only images Andrew, no text. I’m rubbish at Pictionary, and anything involving drawing, although I was a Draughtsman/Designer many years ago, I don’t have the imagination for pictures at all. Think of an image and it’s like a curtain descending in front of my grey cells.

Anyway, next step is to create a new page on my Maximo Secrets site that will contain the links to each post and to make sure the Podcast posts only end up on the Podcast page and that my other posts don’t find a home where they ought not to be. Hopefully all of this can be done without having to change from my current WordPress theme, Rowling. I can, of course, prepare all of this, and just not publish it (yet).

Integrating Your Podcast is the next part of Module 3 and as I’ve been using the block editor for a while this looked reasonably straightforward. I’ve still got to design how I want this to look, of course. The columns are looking interesting it will certainly get me started, but after 30 episodes, there will be 10 rows in 3 columns and that will probably be enough vertical scrolling. The Load More Posts button will allow users to find more episodes, but I have a challenge that I will need to overcome at some point.

The challenge is that if I had a hundred episodes, and while it would be nice for people to start at #1 and work their way through, it is likely that they will want to search on a particular subject area, a module of Maximo, to see if there is content. Ideally, I’ll be able to find a way of tagging the podcast episodes, and then have some links on the side which takes a user to the set of podcasts on a module or subject area. But I don’t need to worry about that yet, and probably not for many weeks.

I did plough through the remainder of Module 3 which concluded with Submitting to Directories, Apple, Google, Spotify, Amazon. It again looks straightforward and those four will probably be sufficient for me. I would make a guess that most listeners will find me through the existing Maximo Secrets website and listen to the podcasts from there. I’ll need to rationalise my main menu as it is getting a few too many items, and I’ll want Podcasts to be visible and not lost among the other menu items. I was on the verge of doing this anyway.

There is a lot of activity on the Podcast community this week. Richard has been asking for feedback on the trailer for his new podcast My “draft” trailer – what do you think? It is very professional, if I created something like that, I would be more than satisfied, but he asked for a critique and with the mantra of being all in and getting involved, in went my four penny worth. Requesting feedback requires courage, receiving it also takes courage, giving it in a constructive way takes sensitivity and courage, I hope I was sensitive Richard.

While I have launched My Podcasting Journey and caught up to week 5, this week I am writing it during the week, I guess as I am adding my thoughts each day it might end up being longer.

I have another nagging thought that has been rattling away this week, am I focusing too much on my journal of which this page is the sixth and not enough on the podcasts themselves. Perhaps I should take the journal and make that a podcast, a podcast about making a podcast. Now be serious Andrew. I think the nagging thought has credibility, the podcast journal consumed a lot of my time last week, so I am pleased to say I am knuckling down to the real deal this week and I am making progress on the scripts for the first 4 episodes. Even if I complete these by Sunday, I will be two weeks behind and a third needed by the following Sunday.

I listened to my Zoom recordings for the week and made some notes, and then wrote another post for the community, titled, My First Zoom Calls, which you can read here – https://thediaryofadigitalnobody.wordpress.com/2022/02/14/my-first-zoom-calls/

There were a few surprises and it a worthwhile exercise listening to yourself. I had learnt in the distant past that how you perceive yourself and how others perceive you may be quite different, it was the same for my voice, it was not the dull monotone that I expected. The week of Zoom calls were all unprepared and I now have a natural baseline to compare with in future recordings. The next set of recordings must have the objective of providing at least one recording worth editing, and so it must be substantially better, and preparation, I think, is the key.

I didn’t hit all the objectives I had set, several but not all, I knew I was being overly optimistic. I did work on the main objective to complete the scripts for weeks 1 to 4 but didn’t quite make it. I did complete Module 3 of the course and listened and made notes on the first 10 episodes of Richard’s podcasts http://www.CanIMakeAHitPodcast.com, it is very useful. Analysing 5 hours of my first Zoom calls was the curved ball that made me miss the other objectives.

So, what are my goals for next week (week 7)?

• Complete the documentation for my podcasts weeks 1 through 5.
• Do a trial record of my podcast Maximo Bite Size – Episode 1.
• Start building the posts on the current MaximoSecrets site, without publishing them, the assumption is I won’t need to change themes. 
• Revisit the objectives I set in week 4.
• Capture a Zoom call worth editing, and use Descript for this.

And finally, just as I thought I had determined how my podcast would look, those doubts from a couple of weeks ago have re-emerged. The last couple of weeks I haven’t made as much progress on my regular articles as I would have liked, I have been given some other priorities. This probably means that the podcast will not be like a diary, or a diary with a few gaps in it. This has made me consider a few other ideas, and now I have several ideas, but no plan.

I’ll continue the journey as if I have no doubts, I just hope somethings becomes clearer over the next week.