Early in the week I caught up with My Podcasting Journey publishing Week 18 to the new WP Courses Community Blog. That’s a bit of a mouthful someone ought to think of an alternate name to give it a more approachable identity.

It was a bit of a relief getting one half of my catch up completed early in the week. It is Thursday and I am tackling the second point in my objectives to try and write what is happening during the week rather than leaving it to a few days after the end of the week when I have trouble trying to remember what happened yesterday, let alone seven or more days before.

I got a useful tip from Tanya in that you can use Markdown tags to improve the formatting of plain text in the comment box where we can “Say what is on your mind…”. I’ve used some of these tags previously on the Excerpt for a post, so I will go back to the few that I have posted and see whether I can give them a bit of gloss, or colour even.

On Maximo Bite Size by Friday, I had posted my 30th podcast transcript to Maximo Secrets and the second chapter on Maintenance Planning is complete and now we are on to Service Management. http://maximosecrets.com/maintenance-planning/ Two weeks to go to the end of May and averaging five a week I should easily hit the target of 40 by the end of the month.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been dropping a hint now and then to my management team at work what my New Year’s hobby has become, and they are beginning to get interested in the podcast and what might flow from this. So, even more pressure to get the trailer done, and get started, I’ve got the material and I’ve been practising my out loud speaking skills during the final proofreads, although I’m still trying to disguise that I am obviously reading.

My next step apart from the trailer is to record the final proofread of an episode even if I don’t intend to use the recording. I expect I can learn from listening back, and I’ll also learn the process of recording.

As each episode is going to be short, 4-7 minutes and they are intended to be listened to one after the other, I’ll have to make the introduction and ending short, and probably without music. I’ll need also to work on the text for the introduction and ending, perhaps a phrase to finish with something like “until another time, goodbye”, but I can do better than that.

I posted Week 2 and Week 3 of my podcasting journey to the new community. I had to split each into two parts, because I write too much and blow the 4,000 character limit. By the time I had figured out how to use some of the Markdown text I was getting much faster at it, no doubt it will sink in after a few weeks. Not being able to reference another person in the community is a bit disappointing.

The community “Comment Box” comes from the PeepSo plugin, and I had a look at their website, and they look to have some good tools for helping to build a training site. I believe having an active community is key for a successful training site.

Having experimented with Markdown I posted my first… What do you call adding something to the comment box that isn’t a comment? Comment, Post, Thingy? I posted my first thingy comment to the comment box called ‘Having fun with Markdown’ for anyone else who would like to experiment.

When I look back at the objectives I set for the beginning of the week, as I do every week, it is very much the same set of objectives with a few swapping places. Catching up on the backlog of weekly posts for The Diary of a Digital Nobody has to be a priority because of the stress involved in being behind. I have written a lot, just not finished proofreading it yet. But the trailer to Maximo Bite Size must be the highest priority because I feel a work commitment coming on, and myself rapidly moving to my first recording. Nothing like work pressures to make something happen, even if I’m doing the podcast in my own time.

So, the objectives for Week 20 are:

• Catch up with Weekly 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 3 of Maximo Bite Size, add five more episodes next week. Total target for May is 40 episode transcripts, currently I have 30.
• 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.