The week started with making a few small changes to the header of the MaximoSecrets.com website. The logo appeared at the top of the right-hand side panel which I am looking to eliminate, so first step was to remove it and instead add the logo to the banner. I’ve also added a tagline, something which the SEO course suggested I should have. The height of the banner was initially a little larger than it was, aligning the height with the top of the second menu as aligning it with the bottom of this menu made the banner too large when viewed on a phone. Then I noticed that the menu bled over the top of posts and the search bar, so I reset the banner height to align with the bottom of the second menu.

Next up was adding a YouTube link to the Social menu, this worked nicely. I followed this up with the link to the podcasts on Apple and Spotify, but neither of these showed up with an identifying logo or hover over text, just the link symbol, so I removed them. I might return to this at another time if I change themes. The Rowling theme does say it supports Spotify.

I have wanted to separate the podcast episodes and YouTube transcripts from the regular blog posts, not that I have created any new ones for the last five months as I have been somewhat side tracked on my new projects. This should change soon. I’ve created a Blog Page and added it to the top menu and used the Advanced Filtering to exclude YouTube and Bite Size categories. This will allow me to move to a static home page although on this I may show the last five to ten articles of any type: post, page or project.

Two of my goals are to surface some old posts, and to boost the SEO. I’ve created three additional pages under Blog in the top menu. The first is the top 10 posts in the last year (365 days) with links to the articles and a post block filtered to these posts. I’ve done something similar for the top 20 all time posts, many of which do not appear in the former page, mainly because they have been around for a longer time. These are I think the top 20 posts that Google is finding through various searches. The third page is a smaller set of posts which are my favourites, ones I think visitors might find interesting and worth a read. All three lists will be the posts that I’ll now focus on to try and improve the SEO rankings, applying the things learnt on the SEO course, for example to create excerpts, to give images a caption and alternative text, to add a table of contents block, etc. These will all be items that I’ll apply to new posts in the future.

It did occur to me during the week how I notify my visitors when I’ve updated a post or page. Should I change the published date or would that be damaging my SEO rankings. I posed a Feedback question to the WordPress community and received an answer back from David, the SEO course instructor that Google would know when people had been monkeying around with the date, and I assume from that comment that the post would be penalised as a result.

This begs the question, does Google know when you have updated a post or page? Is there a way of alerting Google that the post needs to be rescanned? Also, how do you alert visitors that a page has been updated, I don’t mean a typo, but something more fundamental?

It seems the consensus is that you should not change the published date. You can reshare a post that has been updated, but what I really want to do is highlight to visitors the posts that have been updated. An update will mainly be replacing the screenshots from the older version of Maximo to the newer version of Maximo, but I’ll also make other SEO related changes at the same time. With 300 posts/pages, nearly all of which are out of date with the new version’s user interface I need to highlight the pages I have revisited, and I will probably use a tag for this. Beyond the 30 or so blog posts that will be my initial focus and that are on pages found from the top menu, I do need to find a way of alerting visitors that there are updated posts, perhaps with another page of blog posts designed specifically for this purpose.

I published the 40 podcast transcripts ahead of the time when I started to add the podcast recording as an audio block. When I add the podcast audio, I have been updating the published date. The podcast episodes must be in a certain order, and the published date seems to be the only way to control the order. This does leave me with a problem, I could revert to the original dates.

I suspect the answer is with a plugin and over the weekend I started to look at plugins that might be useful, to justify to myself why I might upgrade to the Business plan, which is over twice the monthly fee that I am currently paying. I did find several that could be interesting including All in one SEO (ALLINONESEO) and Seriously Simple Podcasting. Perhaps I should ask the community what Plugins they use, and they think are useful.

The tenth video and podcast were launched during the week, this is all very much business as usual now. Subscribers is growing, but now at a slow rate, I didn’t make 550 subscribers by the end of the week, and 600 by the end of September looks to be at the top end of optimism unless I find a source of new subscribers. In the first instance I’ll see if I can reach out to the IBM Support team to see whether there is a subscriber source there, they would find the videos useful.

I did make a simple mistake in the video and audio recording this week, which ended up costing me four hours of time. I forgot to turn on the electric socket that my spare power adapter is plugged into. The result was the occasional flash in the screen, a few milliseconds but noticeable, I took this to be that the battery couldn’t cope with the processing and writing to the flash drive. When I re-recorded with power there were no flashes. I had previously come across this on the first video, but then I was trying to record video and audio through the same software resulting in a few flashes and 50% of the video showing a black screen. Looking back, I have an idea that part of that problem may have been running on battery. Still lesson learnt and I doubt I’ll make the same mistake again.

Even with that mistake I had most of Friday to play with PowerDirector 365 the new video editing software I purchased. All good so far, quite easy to use apart from trying to align the video and audio which I record separately, but then that was the first step, with new software. The Green Screen Removal and Picture in Picture were both OK, I had to adjust the colour range to counter the shade on the green screen, I’m still using natural light and I do get a bit of shadow from the window. I can’t record video until after the sun has gone around to the South as if there were a sudden break in the cloud it would end up being a white trapezoid after the green screen filter has done its best, you cannot eliminate white light.

PowerDirector’s splitting of the stitched together video into video segments which are effectively slides in the slide deck has a very similar user interface to Lossless Cut which I have been using to date, so this was easy to adapt to. I found I could add the section breaks into the same track as the Keynote video transitions, the fewer tracks you are working with the easier it is to understand. One small issue that I haven’t had to face previously is that you cannot extend the length of a video, so if the Keynote video finishes before the speaker, then I had to pad it out with a screenshot. I should be able to find a way of always making the Keynote video longer in duration than my speaking part so that I can cut a piece out, eliminating the need to save a screenshot as an image (.JPEG).

I’ll certainly finish the last few stages of reproducing the current video using PowerDirector next week, but I don’t know whether I will be far enough ahead to adopt to the new workflow, especially as next week I aim to try and produce two videos. The other idea I’ve got is to also write a blog post on the same topic as the video but using the style I’ve adapted to over the years, more a set of screenshots showing my tests of a particular Maximo function. For these new posts I will aim to use as many of the points I documented in how to improve the SEO, a table of contents block, image captions and alternative text, excerpt, etc.

There was one thing I completed this week that has been on the objectives for a few weeks, I’ve now created End Screens for each YouTube video and added to the video description a link to the slides/transcript and the podcast episode, both a link back to the right posts on my website.

The End Screen is an area at the end of the video which someone can click to perform an action. One element is the Maximo Secrets logo that would subscribe the watcher to the channel, the other takes the watcher to the next video in the series. For a couple of videos, I didn’t really have enough time after I disappear before you get to the end of the video, and you can’t extend the length of a YouTube video. In the future I need to make sure I do have enough space, even if that means that I will need to trim the video. This is something that will be a lot easier to handle in PowerDirector. Having said that while I am averaging 30% watching to the point where I get to the slide where the End Screen will be positioned, half the watchers rapidly drop off at that point, and will never get to see the End Screen.

The objectives for week 37 will be:

• Publish the eleventh podcast episode and video using normal workflow
• Record and edit the remaining three podcast episodes of the Asset Management series.
• Create and publish a post for the same subject as the 11th video/podcast but using what I learned from the SEO course.
• Prepare the post and Keynote slides for the 12th video.
• Complete the exercise of reproducing the 10th video using PowerDirector 365.
• Take the third step in revamping the Maximo Secrets website – a static home page.
• Do some test recordings with the new Lavalier microphone.

Looks like another busy week ahead.