It was Richard’s reply to last week’s podcasting journey that spurred me on to finally writing my podcast objectives MaximoSecrets Podcast Objectives. This has been one of my weekly objectives since week 5, two months ago. 

When I spent a few hours thinking about my objectives with a G&T close by, I concluded that it was the digital scrapbook that I felt had the highest priority. This is extending the website of ‘The Diary Of A Digital Nobody’ with other pages that have been previous hobbies that I want to resurrect.

The first of these is moving twenty paperback reviews I made in 2013 and 2014 when I was learning how to create a blog. I managed to find them on Google’s Blogger application, but I had to spend a while trying to log in and then find out how to get to the editing pages of the blog, I succeeded, and now it is easy to copy/paste and then reformat. The first two book reviews have been copied across and I have found a format like the one I had before, using an Excerpt with some html code to bolden the title and throw a line break afterwards. 

One of the annoying things is that it is difficult finding an image with any reasonable definition for a paperback cover. On a laptop the featured image on the blog post does not look great, but it is OK on an iPad. I’ve also noticed that not all images are the same size, but the featured images would look better if they were identical size, especially as they will sit next to each other in three columns. I’ll have to find a way to fix that. 

My first attempt at the new page called Paperback Secrets, had the same information to the right of the image. I concluded that this was coming from the page rather than the post. Eventually I deleted the blog post block and recreated it by hand rather than using one of the suggested styles. Now I had to find a way of including the book’s author below the featured image and I eventually extended the Excerpt with some additional text and html code https://wordpress.com/support/excerpts/.

I was back into Canva again adapting a duplicated logo with a suitably colourful image of a set of bookshelves. Now I have the new page setup it will be back to creating reviews of the books I have recently read, I confess to only one so far this year, you know what has been taking up my time.

The other objective that I have been looking into is Image Optimization, I’ve been using the WordPress support site article https://wordpress.com/support/media/image-optimization/. I opted for GIMP and downloaded it; it has a huge number of settings which I suspect will go unused. It seems to work fine, I peered at two images switching back and forth and zooming in to see if I could tell which was the poorer cousin, but they looked the same, although the compressed one was several times smaller as a JPG versus a PNG.

All the images and logos have now been compressed and I am familiar enough with the steps to mean that I can start the process of adding some photos to the My 2022 Diary posts.

Another issue I had was that My 2022 Diary was running from the latest post back to the earliest. For a diary I really want it to start with the oldest one first, as if you were reading a book. Another block, called Latest Posts, was found, where you can set the order. Thinking ahead, I’m wondering what would happen if I had thirty or more weeks? Somehow, I need to also find a way of allowing the reader to jump to week 10, 20, etc, or to jump to the latest week and work backwards.

I feel as if I have made good progress this week. Although I am now two weeks behind on My 2022 Diary, weeks 11 and 12. Writing out the objectives including the Grand Vision and Short Term Goals was a fruitful exercise. I’ve relegated a first podcast episode to the end of April, so you’ll need to wait a while for it.

The objectives for Week 13 are then:

• Continue to copy over my book reviews to the new blog post page Paperback Secrets.
• Start a new blog post page for Mixology, I took a few photos of cocktails at the weekend.
• Catch up on the two missing My 2022 Diary posts.
• Start adding photos to My 2022 Diary posts.
• Start the FSE training course on WordPress.
• 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’.
• Maintain a daily diary, it needs to become a habit, some days I write something, other days I have a blank page.
• Start learning how to edit using Descript and the captured Zoom calls.

I thought I made good progress, but the bullet list seems to be growing.