The kitchen timer is set for one hour, and a CD of Schubert Impromptus is playing, time to recall what happened this week.

The merry go round of YouTube video and podcast was the 11th in the series on Asset Management, three more and I’ll be on to the second series and playlist, Maintenance Management, and I’ll have to choose a new TrackTribe track for the music.

I nearly didn’t complete the podcast/video by the end of the week. I decided on Tuesday that I would write an article on the same subject, Asset Downtime. This goes in much deeper than the video and podcast and shows through screenshots how that part of Maximo actually works. It isn’t quite the content of a “How To” video, although a video of this type would cover similar ground, but not so deeply.

I’ve been using the style for these articles for at least the last two years, perhaps longer. They end up being long reads, Asset Downtime was 29 pages. Extra time was taken adding in things that I learnt from the SEO course. The images (30+) have captions and Alternative Text, and I made the image files more descriptive prior to uploading them. I didn’t add the caption/Alternative text in the media area as I tend never to reuse images, the chances are that the data in the screenshot would not be the same, if I happened to need to show a similar image on another article. The post has an excerpt and a table of contents at the top, which is a great addition.

I didn’t quite publish the article on Friday, I will do on Tuesday, Monday is now a public holiday in the UK. I’ve made a list of ten phrases associated with Asset Downtime or Report Downtime, that I think people might be asking when they query for something in Google, I didn’t actually get that much from Google itself. The headings I use are the terms used in Maximo and are likely to be included in the most common search terms, but I do want to make sure I have included the ten phrases and I will also look to add a short paragraph after each heading to explain what will be covered. Hopefully I can weave a phrase into these paragraphs.

Going forward I am aiming to write an article in addition to the podcast episode and video each week, but the article may be on a completely different subject. The articles do set the groundwork for “How To” training videos and once I have finished Asset Management, I will spend time planning a training programme for it.

Midweek I upgraded to the Business plan on WordPress. I want to try and improve SEO and there are some plugins for this, All in One SEO, YoastSEO. I also want to do more with the podcast particularly to control the order and allow podcast seasons under Maximo Bite Size. The podcast episodes are serial within a season. The standard WordPress podcast features does not support order or seasons and I can’t add the trailer to Apple, Google, and Spotify. I will start with Seriously Simple Podcasting as that has been recommended.

Over the winter I will start to revisit previous articles, to update them with screenshots from the latest Maximo version and make SEO related improvements. There are probably some easy things I can do with blocks like Table of Contents to improve the style of each post. I want to be able to show modified dates, but be able to control what constitutes a modification, certainly not a simple correction, for example. No doubt there are plugins for this sort of thing.

Longer term I will explore turning part of the website into an area where there will be paid for access. This is likely to contain the “How To” training courses. My quick scan of plugins saw that there were some for Learning Management Systems and Membership. So, I decided to upgrade to gain the plugin capability and found a very useful coupon code to lessen the financial burden.

My first plugin installed has been Seriously Simple Podcasting. Easy to install, but I haven’t found it simple at all. I’m still not sure whether I need a Castos account, I’m assuming not, as I am not asking Castos to host my podcast. If I was starting a new podcast, I think the use of the term Simple might be justified, but I’m not. I already have forty posts which are the transcripts of my podcast episodes, the first eleven of which are recorded and on Apple, Google, and Spotify. What I am trying to do is tell Seriously Simple Podcasting that I already have posts for the podcast that I want to use, and after 6 hours so far, I have drawn a blank, I can’t find a way of doing this. Why do I want to do this? I don’t want to lose the views I have on the existing posts.

When you use Add New Episode, Seriously Simple Podcasting creates a new post with a special post type of podcast. The Podcast Episode Details are at the bottom of the post. All my existing posts have the section on Podcast Episode Details, but if you enter the details it doesn’t show as an episode. The conclusion is that I’ll need to give Castos a call next week to see whether something which to me seems to be a likely need, whether it is possible.

At the weekend I also spent time reviewing a few plugins. I have no budget so free plugins are the only ones I will look at currently, in the future I may succumb, but I do need some revenue first.

The first two plugins will be to show the Modified Date (WP Last Modified Info) and control when it gets updated (Limit Modified Date). There are two plugins that add Gutenberg blocks. I was thinking that I would use Spectra, but I’ll need to compare that with WordPress Gutenberg Blocks. Another plugin might be Search & Filter, to enhance the capability for users to find something on the website, but I haven’t done any research to compare this with anything else. The All in One SEO plugin is likely to also be added but I’ll wait a while until I have the Podcasting sorted. A general principle will be to implement one plugin and then move on to the next, it will be interesting to see whether I keep to this.

For the Learning Management it does look like WP Courseware is a good bet, although it is not free $129/year. LearnPress is also a close contender. But I think these can wait until I am building the content for the first course. My gut feel says that if I am heading towards adding Learning Management then I really ought to be on a theme that allows full-width display, so looking to change themes will need to be considered first. Certainly, a lot to keep me busy for several months.

The objectives for week 38 will be:

• Publish the twelfth podcast episode and video using normal workflow
• Record and edit the remaining podcast episodes of the Asset Management series.
• Create and publish a post using what I learned from the SEO course.
• Complete the exercise of reproducing the 10th video using PowerDirector 365.
• Work out whether I will be using Seriously Simple Podcasting or something else.
• Add some plugins to control modification of posts. Also, to give a wider range of blocks to use.
• Take the third step in revamping the Maximo Secrets website – a static home page, which ideally would be full-width.
• Review themes that will provide full width control, but are still responsive to work on iPad or iPhone.
• Do some test recordings with the new Lavalier microphone.

Looks like another busy week ahead (again).