How time flies!

I managed to post My Podcast Journey Week 19 on time this week as I was preparing it during the week when everything was fresh in mind. That is exactly what I am doing now, for week 20.

When I posted Week 4 to the WordPress Courses Community, again in two parts, I realised that there were some references to other posts that I had made, one of which had an image. That made me wonder whether it is possible to add an image in the little comment box. Tanya came to the rescue, and after 30 minutes I managed to get an image to appear.

You need the URL for the image from your website which you get by going to your Media library, finding the image and then right-click and using the Copy Image Address. Then it can be used with . Tanya had replied to my post Having Fun with Markdown 2 where I had discovered italics and formatting of single lines of text (as in verse) without using bullets. It doesn’t look as if you can colour text though with Markdown.

On Tuesday there was a Podcasting Event, hosted by Georgina – Creating a Podcasting Site with Full Site Editing, hopefully we’ll see the recording soon. This was timely for me, as I am getting close to starting to record the 30+ episode transcripts that I’ve written and posted to Maximo Secrets. This will be the start of the Maximo Bite Size podcast, nothing more than me recording what I have written. A new skill, nonetheless.

It looks as if I will add an Audio Block to each post. Then a Podcast Player Block to a new page which will be the feed to Apple Podcast. The Podcast Player Block will have all the podcast episodes. The trick will be how to create several series (I call them chapters). The episodes in each series must be listened to in order, it wouldn’t make sense in starting at the latest one. Each series could be listened to out of order, but again it would be less confusing to listen to them in an order. This will be the challenge, and I really need to start experimenting now to see how it might be handled.

The trailer to Maximo Bite Size and getting it working with Apple Podcast seems slightly less important than it did. Recording and embedding the Audio Block in each post seems to be the next step.

Both the webcam and the Blue Yeti microphone came into action this week and a chance to practise my speak-out-loud style. The owner of the small Dutch company I work for is getting very keen on us preparing some videos and creating a YouTube channel. There is an ex-colleague of one of our team who has been successful in building a digital business that has brought in a lot of services, but it started out with a podcast and website, and then moved to creating training videos and has grown from there to be the number one Dutch website in its field. He has spoken to us and sees potential and is keen to get involved as a coach.

We are now looking at the mechanics of creating professional training videos, the tools that will be needed, durations of episodes, etc. The one video that I created a few years ago has now been placed in our general wiki, I’ve commented on my own creation, including how we could improve, and we might be inviting others to comment also, and I will be reaching for my hard hat again.

By the end of the week, we had made several experiments, with video of the narrator (me) being close to the camera or further away. The further from the microphone the audio gets distant and in the dining room which would have been the ideal from a space point of view, the echo in a room with the least furnishings might be difficult to overcome.

We are also playing with the composition of the video, fade in/out on sections during the intro and outro. The current focus is content for the “teasers” rather than the actual training courses. Music content will not be an issue because the owner is a musician in his spare time.

Video adds an extra level of complexity and more so, than a podcast where your principal worry is the audio. The wallet has been opened once more and next week I should be the owner of a mic stand to allow me to do the podcast audio standing up and an isolation shield to reduce the effect of sound bouncing off the walls. I will be playing with an autocue/teleprompter software so that I can read the transcript in as few takes as possible. I’m going to try Speakflow. An ex-colleague has also found some settings for Audacity for those who aspire to the standards for Audio Books, and I thought those settings would be a reasonable starting point for the podcast.

So, everything seems to be moving ahead. Green screen and lighting will be needed for the video work, but I need to find the suitable place in my home where it can be setup and left, rather than repeated taking out and putting away again.

On the negative side, I am getting further and further behind in writing up the weekly diary for ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’.

So, the objectives for Week 21 are:

• Catch up with the Weekly Diary
• Trial Speakflow and set up Audacity for Audio Books standards.
• Produce the first episodes for Maximo Bite Size and add to the Asset Management posts.
• 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 35.
• Add a page to my digital scrapbook for ‘Our Garden’
• Research Green Screen and Lighting for videos.
• 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.