I have the feeling of podfade before I’ve recorded my first podcast episode. OK, I have 10 weeks of posts to record for ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’ but for the first week I achieved very little of the objectives I set myself at the beginning of the week. I have the feeling I’m on a merry-go-round. I play bridge on Monday and Tuesday evenings, and then on Wednesday and Thursday I am playing catch-up on the two articles I write each week. 

I am wondering whether part of this is a reaction to the effort of trying to get the website launched. But what didn’t help this week was that I was very busy at work helping to get a contract out where we had been squeezed into less time than one working week, I also had no time to write anything on Sunday evening which has been fairly normal for me in recent weeks.

One positive feeling about the podcasting week was our Office Hours session on Tuesday with Cesar Abeid. l thoroughly enjoyed this, it was a pity that there seemed to be few listeners, perhaps others will listen to the recording. 

I rashly offered to write the notes and was thankful that there was a recording to listen to, and as I listened back there were several occasions where I was laughing or smiling to myself. Did others feel the same? Or was I looking at this with a different lens. I seemed to have taken over the role of interviewer, sorry about that if I barged-in, it didn’t feel like it at the time, although I know at times, I was waiting for others to ask a question.

I suppose the notes put me back a day, not that I regret making the offer, or writing the notes. Perhaps this is just a blip and normal service will be resumed in week 12. The notes can be found here – https://thediaryofadigitalnobody.com/2022/03/17/office-hours-notes-cesar-abeid%ef%bf%bc/

My blog Maximo Secrets hit a new peak during the week. On Tuesday it failed to break the new Daily Views record set a month earlier, by only 7 views. Then, on Wednesday with no WordPress notifications that my stats were booming it blew through the 1,460 and set a new high-water mark at 1,784. I thought I was bound to break the Weekly Views record as well, but sadly not. My target for the year is 300K views which means that I need to regularly hit 6K views a week. Having succeeded to do this for the first time on 10th Jan, last week was the fourth occasion, so looking good. What I am surprised at, is that I’ve not posted anything for 7 weeks. I’m in the middle of a set of 11 articles which I must get published next week, it is hanging over me, and adding to that feeling of weight on my shoulders.

I was conscious of Victoria, my wife, getting up on Sunday morning to make herself a cup of tea, she thought I was still asleep, partially anyway. The next moment she was laughing in bed, and when I turned over and asked her, she read a passage from My 2022 Diary – Week 9. It is just the sort of thing that Mr Pooter might have said, she said. Mr Pooter is the author of the fictitious diary ‘The Diary of a Nobody’ that my diary’s title is loosely based on. He is a wonderful character from the Victorian era, a little pompous, but generous in heart. It was first published in Punch, so would have been considered to be a little light-hearted, comic even.

As she read through all the weeks except the first, when Reggie our dog went missing, she didn’t want to return to that, she validated my efforts and said that I had a way of saying things which were quite engaging. If I minimised the boring bits and made slight adjustments on some of the passages that was going to bring a smile, to bring out a bigger smile or laugh, it would just add that little extra something. I’m not trying to make myself look ridiculous, I said, as Mr Pooter may seem on occasion, but I know she was probably thinking I was, a little, sometimes. Perhaps a little eccentric, I thought to this thought, but not ridiculous.

Victoria did make one observation, obvious really, shouldn’t you start a diary at week 1? Posts are reverse chronological, perhaps I can reorder the blog post block.

The objectives I set for Week 11 are, I am embarrassed to say, been rolled through to Week 12.

• Investigate what I need to do to compress photos and other graphic files.
• Investigate how to reorder the blog posts.
• Do a trial record of Episode 1 of ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’. I’ll use Audacity for this.
• Complete and proofread the documentation of six episodes of ‘Maximo Bite Size’.
• Start the FSE training course on WordPress.
• Maintain a daily diary (it needs to become a habit)
• Revisit the objectives I set in week 4, now considering both podcasts.
• Start learning how to edit using Descript and the captured Zoom calls.

At this point, just getting the first bullet achieved and I’ll feel as if I have accomplished something. If I don’t get the two articles written, I will definitely have hit the podfade buffers.