There was not a lot of activity this week and I am getting behind. It is Easter holidays for my wife who works away at a school, so my evening hours have been spent with her rather than tapping away at the keyboard. We did get away for a few days to Lisbon midweek, so that reduced the amount of time working on ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’ and the weekly diary is now two weeks behind, although I have copious notes for the days when we were away.

Having said I made little progress I have now transferred all 26 of the book reviews I made a few years ago from the Google Blogger account to the new Paperback Secrets page on my WordPress site. This includes the Waterstones book review I made for each one, which I have entered as an Excerpt, with a bit of HTML coding for bolding and line breaks. For those who are not in the UK, Waterstones is about the only high street bookstore, which has not succumbed to online alternatives, and is not a small independent. Its flagship store in Piccadilly, London is a magnet for inspiration and purchases, and I am currently sitting next to approximately 100 purchases that have so far gone unread, I have half that number again balancing on my bedside table.

I moved over to using Google Chrome from Safari, to try out the Microsoft Editor which has an Extension on Chrome. It is pointing out Spelling, Grammar, and Refinements. This is useful, as I used to copy the text to Microsoft Word anyway to see what suggestions it would make. I think overall it provides a small benefit; I still maintain a local digital copy of each post in Microsoft Word on my laptop. Perhaps, it cuts out one proofread; put it this way, I am going to keep going with it rather than deinstall it.

What I find a bit annoying is that the Microsoft Editor makes suggestions which in the type of text I am writing I would like it to ignore. For example, in the previous paragraph it does not like the phrase “I think overall it…” preferring to use “Overall it” instead. The following sentence starting with “Perhaps” it suggests as being superfluous, which it is of course, but this would be my spoken style, I think.

And, I have just discovered that the “…” symbol next to the Ignore Button takes you to the settings (see Featured Image) with a whole host of options, so that I could tune some of the refinements or grammar to the style that I am writing. In the context of a podcast transcript, the language you will use must sound natural, and perhaps a little bit more verbose that the written word. You see, it highlights the “perhaps” as a superfluous word again.

March was a good month for the stats on MaximoSecrets topping out at 26,451 views and 7,290 visitors. My previous best had funny enough been in the same month last year falling short of 24,000 views and barely getting over 6,500 visitors. March 16th saw a record, but I’ve just noticed the number has been adjusted down by 21, it is now showing 1,763 views. Week 12 was also a significant week; the stats now show that I got past 1,000 views on each weekday. This is a first and I have been annoyingly close before, sometimes not making it on the Friday, and worse getting over the line on a Friday but failing on one other day of the week. I didn’t mention it last week in My Podcast Journey because in this case the daily amount for the Friday has been adjusted upwards now scraping in at 1,002 views. Anyone noticed stats adjustments before? Any understanding of the reason for them?

The objectives for Week 14 are now:

• Start a new blog post page for Mixology, I’ve taken a few photos of cocktails over the last couple of weekends.
• Catch up on the three 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 is still not a daily habit, perhaps for half the days in a week. 
• Start learning how to edit using Descript and the captured Zoom calls.

I’m optimistic for Week 14 as I intend to start to write Maximo Bite Size articles during the working day, I can justify this for multiple reasons. I wonder how many I will write and what the average length will be? Should I post them as I write them?