I am beginning to feel that I am on a treadmill. Each week I have a podcast episode and a video to complete and publish at the same time. I am trying to work back to publishing on a Tuesday lunchtime and this will take a couple more weeks before I’ve achieved this. It is Wednesday and I have just recorded the next video, so if nothing goes wrong, I’ll have both published at the end of the day Thursday. I now must choose whether to spend Friday investigating something new or getting back on the treadmill for the next episode and video, my eighth. I know what I want to do, and I know what I should do, but they are not the same.

Richard just asked in the community how I got on with the Rode Lavalier microphone and I replied that I haven’t got it out of the box yet. But this is not the only item on my backlist of objectives. I still want to see whether I can produce the whole video on iMovie, if I can’t then that will tell me that I really do need to migrate to Final Cut Pro. I still haven’t tried using my daughter’s camera that has a directional microphone to see what difference that makes.

Two new items of work appeared today. The first is the sudden realisation that where I do my recording the reduced amount of daylight in the afternoon is now giving a definite shadow on the green screen. There is no direct sunlight after early morning, but the amount of reflected light is casting shadows, and this will get worse as we advance into autumn. How long will it be before I need to use the credit card again and buy some lighting, and ideally before I do this I really do need to navigate to my old study, which would make a nice studio, but it is full of junk which needs to be sorted and cleared out.

The second item is that someone has just highlighted a Maximo secret, that I didn’t know, I love it when this happens. However, a couple of weeks ago I just completed the video where this secret would have been mentioned. Now I need to provide an addendum, but how do I go about this? Do I try to change the original video, I could do this easily, I still have all the elements for creating the video intact. But what would I do if a secret like this appeared many months later? This wouldn’t be the right course to take. Do I add a comment or add something to the video description? Can I pin a comment to the top? This might be useful for a small correction, but this is something that warrants video content. A video short perhaps? Then, how do I link this to the original video, would an End Screen support this? All of this requires investigation, and the likely route is a YouTube Short. I had been thinking about this, since Richard alerted me to this, but not for this sort of content.

Midweek in response to Feedback Frenzy I asked how you find out what features are supported by which WordPress theme. I didn’t get a direct answer to this, more that you need to know what feature you are interested in and then see what theme supports this. However, I did get some wonderful support from Tanya and Donna who gave some great tips. I got assistance from the Happiness Engineers and at the weekend I had reworked my Maximo Secrets site to include the same banner image as I use on the YouTube channel, and I had utilised the top menu that I didn’t even know the Rowling theme supported. Some adjustment to the menu colours to align with the background image, and now the website has a fresh look.

There is still lots more for me to do on the website. I’ve analysed the 300 plus articles I’ve written over the years and the majority of these can be clustered around a subject area. In the past I’ve used categories, now I just have a long list of categories and I think this has lost some of its effectiveness. I am thinking that a static home page could help, but what I really do need to do next is plan how I want the website to look, and plan for its growth over the next two years.

The wonderful thing about what I write, is that none of it becomes irrelevant over time, in fact some of the most popular posts I’ve written about over the years were written a long time ago. So, people still find them courtesy of Google, but I am sure I can make a lot of the other posts a lot easier to find. So, some reorganisation is next on the list of things to do, and this will help to rationalise how I will use the primary menu.

I’ve never used tags, not entirely certain what they are used for, should I be using them? I’ve ended up with too many categories. As it happens next week there is a community call on ‘Getting Organized with Categories & Tags’, and I aim to attend this. Also, it has made me realise that while I am in my sixth year of having a website, which already has over 6000 views this week, I know very little about constructing a website, the way it looks today is very much how it started out, with additional menu items and categories. So, I’ve decided I’ll start the WordPress blogging course and see what I can learn.

I stumbled across an article on Sunday from a useful site from the Google team called Google Search Central. There will be change over the next few weeks to how Google goes about ranking content, which hopefully my site will be a beneficiary of, over the next few months. If your site has original content that is useful to others, then the site will be marked as being useful. Conversely if your site is a summary of other content or is marked down as chasing SEO ranking and lacks original content or flips across trending topics then your site may not be marked as being useful and will rank poorly in comparison. This doesn’t look like a little tinker by Google, but a fundamental shift effecting the whole site, not just a page. Anyway, it has made me think that I would also benefit from following the WordPress SEO course. https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-content-update?hl=en

By the end of the week, I had recorded the next three weeks of podcast episodes and I’ll do the editing of these on Monday morning before turning my attention to the next video.

I’ve found someone who does YouTube Shorts of a more serious nature, and I’ve analysed their videos to see what I can learn from them. There seems to be two types. One where they talk direct to camera, and another where you get small clips of screenshots zoomed in, showing you how to do something in the reporting software that is their area of expertise. The second set of videos are timed to be 59 seconds as one minute is the maximum duration for a YouTube Short. Certainly, this is interesting, but keeping to one minute might be a real challenge. But what it might be is one minute of snippets from a longer four- or five-minute video with the ability to link from the short to the full-length video.

When I compare with the objectives, I set for week 33 I should be quite pleased with myself. I published the seventh podcast episode and video, recorded the podcast episodes for the next three weeks, completed adding all the slides and transcripts for the remaining videos to the Maximo Secrets website, I even started to flesh out ideas for YouTube Shorts. The start of the reworking of the website wasn’t even on the set of objectives.

So, what objective do I set for week 34?

• Publish the eighth podcast episode and video at the same time, hopefully by Thursday.
• Do the editing of the ninth and tenth podcast episode that I recorded this week.
• Review creating the whole of a video using iMovie. I need to decide on video editing software if I am going to start improving the workflow for creating videos. If iMovie doesn’t work out as expected, then I need to look at Camtasia as I already have license for this.
• Continue with the next step on revamping the Maximo Secrets website
• Create End Screens for the YouTube videos.
• Do some test recordings with the new Lavalier microphone, the box still hasn’t been opened.
• Do something on The Diary of a Digital Nobody. As each week goes by this looks as if it will become mothballed.

And what of the Maximo Secrets YouTube channel? Sometime during Sunday night and Monday morning it broke the 500 subscribers – it is not yet three weeks old.