I’ll start the weekly update with Maximo Bite Size. I set a target of 20 episode transcripts by the end of April, and on Friday I published three more and hit twenty-two. These are currently posts on Maximo Secrets each with an excerpt and cover art which will be used with each podcast episode. The second chapter is a little more than 50% done and I have decided that I’ll start promoting this when the 3rd chapter has started, and I have a podcast show on Apple.

The target for May is to have reached the 40 episode transcripts mark AND to have published as a podcast chapter 1 which includes the fourteen episodes on Asset Management. So, no more prevaricating, it is now or never, either I start creating a podcast or perhaps I never will.

But what of my show on Apple Podcasts? It is still at Draft status with the same message as last week. The 3-5 working days is up, and so I am concluding something is wrong my end and I am assuming that I need to try and publish my first episode or a trailer. The trailer has risen to the top of the objectives for week 18.

This week I’ve tried using the WordPress app on my iPhone to take a photo and publish it through to ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’ website. I’ve done this three times, once with a single photo, ideal for the Mixology page, the second time with multiple photos which is what I would want to do for photos associated with our garden. The third time there was about eight photos.

I try to take photos of the garden each week, what is starting to bloom, but I want to record when the swallows and house martins first appear, when the leaves appear on the copper beech and ash trees, etc. It would be useful to look back on last year and see what there is to look out for in the weeks ahead. Now I am worrying about ash dieback because I don’t know when the ash trees start to push out their leaves. Currently, I have three or four dead looking trees, the only green is a thick matting of ivy which is a roost for local bats.

Anyway, I digress. What I want to find out is as follows:

• Is there any compression of the photos as they are added to the media?
• What is the best way to show a set of images, sometimes it might only be 2-3 photos, up to 6-8 for some weeks?
• What would happen if some photos in a set were portrait and others are landscape? Do they need to have the same orientation?

This is what I’ve found by using the WordPress app:

• It is easy to move between websites, for me between Maximo Secrets, The Diary of a Digital Nobody, or Podcasting for Beginners.
• You can see your Stats, Posts, Pages, and Media and use the View Site to see the website as a visitor – but I knew this already, it is why I had downloaded the app.
• From the big blue button in the bottom right of the Menu tab you can create a new Story post, Blog post or Site Page. I didn’t know this.
• A Story Post seems to be a set of photos with optional text overlays which end up in a story block on a post. When you play the story, each photo is displayed for about 3 seconds. Once uploaded to a post there is no editing that I could see. LinkedIn launched stories with similar capability and one year later in September 2021 they pulled the plug on it. I used it for about 4 or 5 weeks in January last year and then gave up with the idea.
• The Blog Post is what I need, and this seemed to work well with quite a wide choice of blocks more than I currently use today. The Gallery block is the one that seemed to work for multiple photos, but I did have an issue with loading one of the photos where I continually got the message ‘Failed to insert media. Tap for more info.’ with buttons for Retry or Dismiss. There were also blocks for videos and audio. It might be worth seeing whether you can record bird song or a musing and download this.
• When you go to publish you can save as draft, set the categories, set a featured image, add an excerpt, etc. You can create a sticky post that will stay at the top of your page until you remove its sticky status.

The conclusion I came to is that I can use the WordPress app on my iPhone and use this for capturing notes about the garden which will mainly be photos. I can publish immediately and then tinker with the text and image captions from the laptop, this will save me from spending time doing one-finger typing on a phone. If I develop an audience, which I don’t expect, then I’ll save as draft first.

Incidentally, when I went to publish from the WordPress app it was able to load the photo where I was getting the ‘Failed to insert media’ message, I had given up on it, but it loaded and appeared when I viewed it after publishing. When I came to load the post with 8 photos, every one of these failed to load with the same message and I had to retry several times over about 30 minutes before I got them all to load. I amended my conclusion to OK to use the mobile app for a small number of photos, with a large number you might as well plug the phone into the laptop where everything will be uploaded in a couple of seconds.

This is the link with a download for the mobile app Mobile app Overview.

I’ve now looked at the media files. The second post with photos, one was much bigger in size that the other two and that was the one where I was getting the error message. I wonder what caused that. Two of the photos were portrait and one I thought was landscape, but it ended up being almost square. I found a place on the app where you can force a compression and a maximum upload size. I’ll have to experiment further and see whether I can get decent photos of a similar size as if I had passed them through GIMP.

I still need to review the photos from the third post to look at the sizes, some of these were landscape and some portrait. I haven’t concluded yet how to handle a mixed bag of photo orientation. What I do know is that one photo ought to be landscape as these suit the featured image unless your page (and all its posts) is designed for portrait based featured images. More to work out over the next week or so.

The ‘Diary of a Digital Nobody’ website has a new page for Recipes, this was one of the week’s objectives so this can be crossed-off and replaced with another. The first post was for a Kipper Tart, I know, this will not be to everyone’s taste, but the post has the back history of this.

I just saw the announcement regarding WordPress courses. Great, I will probably subscribe to the Blogging one although I have had my blog for more than five years now, “You don’t know what you don’t know”. I checked I could log on to the new community blog, but I do have a couple of concerns:

• Will the old content from the Podcasting blog be moved across to the new site, there will be some useful posts from @rickswpress and others which will not have gone out-of-date?
• Will I be able to post something like I’ve just written? The box for adding posts on the new site looks as if it was designed for something smaller than a matchbox, and I doubt it has access to many block types.

I am wondering whether with this will be the last post in the series of My Podcasting Journey. There is little point posting to the old Podcasting for Beginners blog after this.

By the way, I did start the FSE training course on WordPress and needed to call the Support team before the end of the first lesson of the first course.

The objectives for Week 18 are:

• Produce a trailer for Maximo Bite Size and publish on Apple Podcasts
• Start adding photos to My 2022 Diary posts.
• Complete episode transcripts for Chapter 2 of Maximo Bite Size, likely to be seven more episodes. Total target for May is 40 episode transcripts.
• Add a page to my digital scrapbook for ‘Our Garden’
• Try and come to a conclusion about how I am going to use the WordPress app, what mix of photo orientation works best for a post, how to eliminate the error messages.
• Continue with 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 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.