The week was dominated by launching on LinkedIn both the Maximo Bite Size podcast and the Maximo Secrets YouTube channel. The first five episodes of the podcast had been prepared the previous weeks and so this was launched on Monday. By the time I came to launch the YouTube channel I had the fourth video and on Thursday I added the fifth, this is in addition to the trailer.

I had started out the podcast journey at the beginning of the year and then had written the first 40 episodes in May and June, but the two-month delay was because I was working on how to develop the videos and it felt better to launch them together and to get them started before the Maximo World conference which starts next week, 9-11 August in Austin, Texas.

I doubt the podcast will get many hits, it is a tough listen unless you already have a few years’ experience of Maximo, the target audience is someone brushing up their knowledge before taking the functional certification. The videos should be far easier to digest, but I think for a novice you need a Maximo overview and then a module overview before diving deeper. They could be picked up by anyone with EAM knowledge, a prospect for example, but again the overviews would help, and I’ll need to discuss that with Danny next week. 

A podcast episode and its corresponding video are complimentary to each other, they have the same title and I think if you watched the video, then listening to the podcast episode would help to reinforce what you learnt. It could also be done the other way around.

I had spent a lot of time researching music for inclusion in the videos and podcasts and had in the end found the group TrackTribe. Actually, that’s not true, I found a particular track called Busy City very quickly, and then went around the houses of copyright, and various platforms where you could buy the rights, get them for free under Creative Commons license, or pay a monthly fee. All the time I found it difficult to find a track that suited and if I did find one, I naively thought that all tracks from the same artist would be good, not so, some are good to listen to, but they wouldn’t fit in to what I was trying to produce. I was beginning to think this could become a time-consuming occupation.

In the end I returned to TrackTribe and found that a lot of what they produce is really good. The question then came, can I use it away from YouTube? So, I emailed TrackTribe and this week received a positive answer which makes me feel a lot less worried that I will have the recording artists police knocking at my door. Having found TrackTribe, and the wide range of music genre they produce and with over 100 tracks that are copyright free, I see absolutely no reason to look elsewhere. They are certainly a set of talented musicians.

When I launched the YouTube channel, I was hoping to reach 100 subscribers quickly so that I could apply for a custom URL, I thought this would occur in the first week. By the Friday night I had surpassed the 300 mark and as I write this on Sunday, I am a third the way through to the magic 1000 subscribers which is needed to join the YouTube Partner Programme. 

The other stipulation is 4000 watch hours in a 12-month period. This will only come once there is a sufficient body of videos for the 1000 subscribers to watch, but that is still 4 hours each which is approximately 20 videos at average 12 minutes and watched in their entirety. I am thinking that getting on the Partner Programme where you might occasionally be rewarded with a free cup of coffee is going to take several months.

I think we ought to press through to 25 videos as soon as possible, trying to create two per week, then relaxing back to one per week. I’m thinking that if the average watch time is 25% then I need 4000 subscribers and 20 videos or more like 2000 subscribers and 40 videos, but that may still be optimistic. If in a year’s time I have 50 videos, will I have accumulated enough watch hours? The consensus is to produce one podcast episode and one video a week and publish at the same time of day and day of the week. I’m OK with this as it will give me time to investigate other types of videos, YouTube Shorts, is next on the horizon. But I will need to keep an eye on the watch hours and extrapolate through to when I think 4000 hours will be achievable. If not in the first year, then that tells me we ought to think again.

At the end of the week, I knocked out a trailer for the Maximo World conference, of duration 1 minute 30 seconds, a YouTube Short should target 1 minute, gosh that is no time at all. My hope now is that the CEO of Reliabilityweb who run the conference will play the Maximo World trailer or at least spread it through his social media channels and that there will be a surge in subscribers next week, at least getting us pass the 500 subscribers. 

I did get to play bridge on Monday back in Barnstaple and then online on Tuesday. Neither will stick in memory although both were above the 45%, Tuesday above 50%, so not a disaster, a disappointment perhaps. No golf at the end of the week, Peter has family staying, but we are playing in a pairs competition on Thursday next week as part of August week.

During the week the temperatures have been rising and the skies are blue, and it was a very pleasant weekend. Looks as if we are getting a mini heat wave next week. 

I had grand plans to mow all the lawns on Saturday including a first cut of the new paths through the valley. I waited until after nine in the morning to get the mower out, and it just wouldn’t start, a couple of splutters, after 20 minutes I had to sit down, I had probably flooded the engine. On the second attempt after my break, the cord pulled out of its housing. 

On the outskirts of Filleigh up by the old Little Chef roundabout there is a machinery outlet, so Mike had told me, so I went up there and by late afternoon I had a new mower, that would collect, side shoot or mulch. It was the desire to mulch and not have to collect the clippings I was looking for, as this could save me at least a third of the mowing time, and hard work because taking the clippings to the compost heap requires pushing the barrow and our receptacle for collecting clippings up hill. I could have had the mower repaired, but it was probably 30 years old, and with a heavy roller on the back, it was not the sort of mower we needed, and it had served its time, so this has now gone to scrap. Until this year I hadn’t actually used the mower for at least six or seven years, maybe longer, and after that amount of time, I had little problem starting it. 

The new mower is much lighter and can cut at a higher height. I couldn’t mulch, after four weeks there was too much grass and a layer of hay everywhere after the field had been topped by the local farmer who keeps his sheep on our field. So, I had to collect, and on Sunday I did get my first cut on the new paths, not that this produced much in the way of clippings.

I’ve decided with the new mower I’ll be able to cut some other paths and the ideal time to do this is while the grass has already been cut, so I made my first attempt on the path down from the main field gate towards the wood running alongside the paddock fence. Some traffic had used this route, when the wood was being collected and carted back up to behind the stables, so there was already a path of sorts. The grass won’t grow much over the next couple of weeks as it will be warmer and there is no rain forecast, so I should have time to get this path complete. I’ve also in mind creating a tributary from this path across to the area where we have the latest compost heap, it will make wheeling any clippings a lot easier and would mean that I wouldn’t have to open any gates if there were sheep in the field.

After I had purchased the mower, I cleared the end stable, moving everything out into the yard, putting the remnants of hay from the horses onto the area next to the bonfire. After lunch we moved our first ten barrows of wood from the second and larger pile from the old beach tree, that had been drying on their pallets in what is called a Norwegian Round. Our aim is to repeat the ten barrows each day and hopefully get the whole lot under cover before it starts to rain again. On Sunday morning while Victoria had gone off to the beach for a swim, and Reggie had gone in doors for a siesta, I moved a further twentyfive barrows, and with all the mowing that followed I too had a siesta after lunch. I was quite pleased when I heard that Peter couldn’t play golf, as I was still tired some hours afterwards.