I had hoped for a bumper increase in the number of YouTube subscribers this week once the Maximo World conference opened. At least another 100 subscribers, perhaps 150, by midweek it was looking more likely to be 50. I don’t think anyone was mentioning it, although they promised to. Still, I am not downhearted by this, another 50 is another 50 closer to the 1000 target.

I kept up any excuse to post something on LinkedIn. On Monday it was to provide the results of the podcast platform poll. Spotify and Google Podcasts came out on top. On Tuesday I provided the result that we had achieved 350 subscribers in the first week and that Timestamps, Chapters and Captions had been added to each of the five videos, I’ll explain those terms in a second. On Wednesday I released the 6th podcast episode on Apple Podcasts, and later in the day I followed up with the links for Spotify and Google Podcasts. On Thursday I will release the sixth video, I prepared it on Wednesday. Nothing doing Friday as I’m taking the day off.

On Wednesday I also pushed out the link to the Maximo World trailer that I created on Friday last, and in the post text I pointed out that while USA/Canada exceed 1/3 of all views on the Maximo Secrets website, in the first week they hadn’t made 7% of the subscribers and were only a smidge above NL/BE and a long way behind India at 19% of subscribers. 12 hours later I concluded that the efforts to increase subscribers was down to my LinkedIn effort and nobody else.

On YouTube, Timestamps are entered in the video description under a heading of Timestamps. The first timestamp must start at 00:00, thereafter you provide the parts of the video which will allow someone to go straight to that section. I couldn’t work out how to create Chapters until I happened to enter my first Timestamp and then they appeared, they use the information that you have entered in the Timestamps section of your video description. Chapters appear in a couple of places, but the main one is the red bar at the bottom of the video, which is now in sections corresponding with your timestamps, with hover-over text of the title you provided. A useful addition for whoever is watching the video. Finding the correct time for each timestamp is made easy if you first create subtitles as associated with your narration is the time when the narration should be displayed.

Subtitles are for those people who prefer to read, which might be people where English is not the first language. Captions are additional to subtitles and are to be added in any spot where there is no voice, I entered the captions in square brackets. Adding the captions was not quite as quick as I thought it would be as I found that in some places the subtitle lingered on over a spot where there was no voice, so you had to find the end point of the voice and use that time (or close to it) to start the caption. Adding both subtitles and captions should be considered mandatory as in many counties it is a legal requirement to do both. I still need to check my two trailers to see if there are any places where timestamps, chapters or captions will be useful.

I have no complaints with YouTube Studio, I have found it easy to use, have even edited a couple of seconds off the start of a video. The online help is also good. Not so Apple’s iMovie, which again had me scratching my head this week.

In the sixth video I had finished the video and was just double-checking the transitions from one scene to the next in OBS when I noticed that my shirt for one scene had changed colour. Then on closer inspection I found that the colour of some text had changed colour fractionally, same with a logo. I knew the issue immediately, it was how iMovie was treating the green screen.

In iMovie you cannot do both a Picture in Picture (PiP) and removal of a green screen in one step you must do one, export the video, and then re-import it, to do the second step. I had done the PiP first and was removing the green screen in the second step, and it was making my shirt colour a darker blue check than it had in reality. This was only for the first scene of eleven, so may easily go unnoticed, until someone does point it out in a comment. It was in trying to understand why the text had changed ever so slightly its colour that I realised that the removal of the green screen was being applied across the whole slide and not just the part where the presenter (me) was being shown in front of the green background (the PiP part), it was taking out any tinge of green across the whole slide. The answer was to do the green screen removal first and then apply the PiP element and this worked out OK, but not until I had my credit card out and poised to buy Final Cut Pro for the second time.

Adding the podcast to Spotify and Google Podcast was easy, a matter of copying the RSS feed and following a couple of simple steps. Spotify was perfect. Google Podcasts Manager showed that it had loaded Maximo Bite Size, but I couldn’t find it, until I searched for Maximo and found it under Maximo Secrets, which is my Google account name, and not with the Maximo Bite Size artwork. I am guessing that there might be a two-step process and it might need 48 hours or so before the right name and artwork are provided. I have double-checked and this was indeed the case, Maximo Bite Size can now be found.

Midweek when I reviewed progress against my objectives, I was pleasantly surprised. Normally by the end of the week I achieve the first two bullets at best, but I had achieved most of what I had on my list. I had recorded and edited the 6th and 7th podcast episode of Maximo Bite Size. I had launched the podcast on other platforms and dealt with Chapters and Captions on the videos. There were ten bullets, I’ll not achieve all of these, but midweek I was heading in the right direction.

Over the weekend I went to try and change the banner on the Maximo Secrets website only to realise that the theme I am using doesn’t support using an image and so I am now likely to be faced with changing my theme. The question then comes, how do I know what themes support which features? I really don’t want to change theme, then find out later there is something else I would like to do and have to change the theme again. Going to Full-Site Editing is not something I really want to do quite yet, although I do have some experience of it with my other site, but I am not convinced I have it working correctly with the templates.

When I quickly abandoned revamping my website, I turned to adding a new page and posts for the YouTube slides and transcripts and I now have the first two videos complete and will complete the others next week. This uses the YouTube block that just requires you to enter the YouTube URL and then plays the video within the post. This is handy because it allowed me to play the video while I checked the transcript text. Unfortunately, the slides will need to be adapted to remove the red arrows that I use in the video animation, perhaps I’ll change it to a number is a red circle that I can reference in the text. Later I will add a reference section to the bottom of each post to provide links to other relevant articles including the equivalent podcast episode.

I am hoping that with 5500+ views a week to my website, I’ll be able to attract some people to step over to the YouTube channel and subscribe. I know that I need to rationalise my website menu as it now has too many top-level items, and I should at least consider a static home page rather than one containing the latest blog posts.

I was back on to Canva again adapting the Maximo Bite Size podcast episode artwork to a similar one but with the YouTube logo. I felt it wasn’t right to use the same artwork for both the podcast episode and YouTube video but as they are supposed to work as a pair I didn’t want the artwork for YouTube to be radically different. Perhaps in a few weeks I’ll change my mind on this point.

So, what objective do I set for week 33?

• Publish the seventh podcast episode and video at the same time.
• Create the Maximo Bite Size podcast episodes for the 8th, 9th and 10th weeks.
• Complete adding a post for each YouTube video that has the slides and transcripts.
• Create End Screens for the YouTube videos.
• Do some test recordings with the new Lavalier microphone, the box still hasn’t been opened.
• Start to flesh out ideas for YouTube Shorts.
• Create and publish a podcast episode for The Diary of a Digital Nobody. This, I really need to get into a weekly habit with.
• Catch up on some of the recent missing transcripts for The Diary of a Digital Nobody, the number of missing weeks is increasing almost weekly now!

It looks as if I will exceed 430 subscribers in the first full two weeks of the YouTube channel. I didn’t make 500 subscribers, but I shouldn’t complain about what has been achieved.