One of my objectives for this week was to finish chapter 1 and start chapter 2 of Maximo Bite Size. I’ve done that and I can now remove it from the list of objectives – hurray!

What this means is I’ve now created the transcripts for my first fifteen episodes including the cover art and an excerpt for each episode. The first fourteen of these I’m calling Chapter 1, the subject is Asset Management and I’m using separate pages for each chapter. I’ll not create the new chapter page until all the transcripts for it have been written, but it will follow the same method as for Asset Management with a separate category, a child of the Bite Size category. The latest transcripts will be found on the main Maximo Bite Size page. If you are super interested to see you can find the link here Maximo Bite Size.

What I’m not certain about is whether the eventual podcasts would fall naturally into separate series. I think I would want this to happen as I think people would listen to some series and not others because they may be irrelevant to their business or project. For example, in February and March I wrote a series of long and detailed articles about Linear Assets. While this is a part of Asset Management it is a niche subject that is only relevant to certain industries, those with roads, railways, pipelines, or cables. The core Asset Management chapter I’ve just completed is relevant to everyone who uses or implements Maximo and certainly relevant to the target audience, those preparing for the functional certification exam, linear assets does not feature in this exam.

Anyway, the good news is that I know how to structure the set of articles into a series of podcast transcript pages that are grouped together under the single banner of Maximo Bite Size, so on this side at least I am set up for a long-term future. Now to start the recording.

I am currently on Apple Podcast Connect having just tried to create my first show – Maximo Bite Size. A few weeks ago, I had set up the information on Maximo Secrets website under Media Settings. It is currently in Draft status with the message “We’re still processing your show details. Check back later and then click Publish.”. I can remember @rickswpress saying that a show isn’t accepted immediately. I’ll wait to see how the process proceeds and whether it is successful before doing the same for ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’. Three days later and the show status is still Draft with the same message.

I’ve also crossed-off another of last week’s objectives and I have a new page on ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’ website, one for Mixology. The excerpt for each post has a growing number of HTML tags. The first six cocktails have been posted with my notes. The Negroni which I had this evening took 20 minutes to write the post, download the photo, and publish.

This may not sound significant, but for me it is. Mixology was a 2021 lockdown project combined with a New Year’s resolution, learn to make cocktails, and discover what cocktails I/we like. But the reason for this project and the two others which will eventually make their way into pages of my digital scrapbook was because I wanted to learn how to use a camera that I had bought a year or so before, I needed a few photo subjects. Putting these snaps into the visible world of a website will hopefully encourage me to find out how to take better photos and to start using the huge number of options I find on the camera’s menu. Currently, you won’t find the photos that inspiring, but at least I am getting used to downloading, exporting, and taking the photos through GIMP to compress them.

The Mixology posts are very short, not a lot of text apart from the recipe. This is also part of the learning curve of how to get media efficiently on to a WordPress website and I am sure there will be a mobile app for this to investigate. Another bit of honesty being revealed here, when I downloaded photos from my phone to my laptop there were some photos from before Christmas and I rarely delete a photo, so the disk space required by Apple Photos app just increases over time. Curation is all part of the learning curve. Years ago, when the photo was out of focus you just threw away the print that you had paid for. When you had twenty-four prints none of which was worthy of retaining, you soon learnt to take a photo that would be at least in focus. I was only saying to my wife at the weekend, as justification for spending so much time on ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’, that it is too easy to just click and not think about what it is you are taking a photo of. To click away madly in the hope that one or two photos will be worth keeping, only to never look at the hundreds of photos to find the one or two you feel half proud of. All of this is what I wish to correct over time, it is why I place such significance on the digital scrapbook, I see it as the vehicle for learning to create photos, rather than a series of useless snaps.

Gosh, did I just write all of that! So, what else happened this week?

Ah yes, Richard Midson’s call on Tuesday evening, on Face-to-Face Interviews. Was it really an audience of three people? So, what did I learn?

• Start the conversation and get a rapport with the interviewee(s), this should be recorded they may say something interesting in this warmup, it may take a while for them to forget they are being recorded.
• Two chairs at 45%, V-shaped, knees will inevitably be close together.
• Multiple microphones can be used but it adds extra complexity.
• You can use multiple cameras but again it adds complexity, not as much as multiple microphones, perhaps.
• The output will be more professional with multiple cameras, you can use a DSLR if this can record a video. Be careful of multiple cameras recording different quality levels, ideally everything should be same resolution.
• A directional microphone that you point at the person who you want to speak to next is useful for controlling the interview, especially if there are two or more interviewees.
• Prepare, ideally do not look down at your notes, you want the interviewee to continue with their momentum in the conversation, not to have a break from it while you prepare for your next question.
• Listen to the answer and quiz them on their response because this will often achieve better depth.
• Don’t ask the obvious, ask a question as a bit of curved ball, you will get an autopilot answer with an expected question, and someone may have already asked the question and included it in their podcast.
• Don’t forget to thank the interviewees. Better to leave an open point, a reason for getting back to them.
• Don’t ease into the interview, it might turn off your podcast listeners, if they think it will be boring. Get to the bomb point as soon as possible, you don’t want to include in your podcast the fluffy conversations.

The objectives for Week 17 are:

• Start adding photos to My 2022 Diary posts.
• Add episode transcripts for Chapter 2 of Maximo Bite Size. Target is to complete 20 by the end of April, five more in the next week should be doable.
• Add a page to my digital scrapbook for recipes.
• Find out a quicker way to go from photos straight to WordPress website.
• 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. Hopefully, I’ll have an Apple podcast show any day soon.
• Maintain a daily diary or create a draft post during the week. Don’t leave it to the Monday to think what happened during last week.
• Start learning how to edit using Descript and the captured Zoom calls.