There was little activity this week. I must admit to being thrown by the change to the WordPress podcasting community in its merger with the blogging community and anything else that follows. Perhaps it is because there are no longer any notifications to respond to, that did spur me on particularly in the earlier months of this year. Perhaps it was more of a disruptive week all round because I am also behind in writing my weekly diary. All a bit depressing to be honest, and I must catch up.

In future weeks I’ll have to give a serious thought to what I do write about or add to my blog if I am ever to get and make a podcast, something will need to fall by the wayside.

I’ve been writing a weekly diary called My Podcasting Journey and I was up to Week 17 when the announcement was made that the Podcasting for Beginners community blog was going to be mothballed. I have these articles in my own website, but I thought I would at least have a go at copying them over to the new Courses Community Blog and I published week 1.

I couldn’t use cut and paste without getting a lot of HTML tags. I had to go via Microsoft Word and that worked, but the formatting was not so good, bullets were a bit of a mess, and I couldn’t find a way of adding a heading or using bold text. This looks to me to be much more of a comment box, say hello and not much else. I don’t see people using this for anything more than a couple of sentences. A comment read and then forgotten, rather than a place where you can find useful information from people other than the WordPress team who obviously have access to write their own War and Peace.

I haven’t been entirely put off and next week I aim to try and copy over a couple more of the weekly posts. As I don’t have control over the date of the post if someone wanted to follow what I’ve written it will go as follows Week 1, Week 18 (this post), Week 2, Week 3, Week 19 (next week’s post) etc. far from perfect. So far, I’m not a fan, but I’ll persist to see how this goes for a while.

On a more positive note, I did manage to write a few more of the Maximo Bite Size transcripts and I am on target for reaching 40 by the end of May. The second chapter is more than 95% complete and I will be on to writing the third chapter next week for sure.

I didn’t add anything more to my digital scrapbook and I am three weeks behind in posting my weekly diary although I have them in draft form with varying degrees of completeness. The Diary of a Digital Nobody Getting this and the podcasting journey back up to date will no doubt put me in a more positive frame of mind.

So, the objectives for Week 19 are:

• Catch up with Podcast Journey and Weekly Diary
• Get into a habit of writing something about what is happening every day, or at least writing it in my diary.
• 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 and start Chapter 3 of Maximo Bite Size, add five more episodes next week. Total target for May is 40 episode transcripts, currently I have 26.
• 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.
• Start learning how to edit using Descript and the captured Zoom calls.