The twelfth YouTube video was created on time, but I didn’t start the next one. Next week I need to record two and publish one because the following week I will be away from my green screen and microphone.

I’ve been in contact with Castos who make the plugin for Seriously Simple Podcasting. It seems an unusual case to be migrating from WordPress own podcasting capability, perhaps it is relatively new. They set up their own business account and podcast to see what is happening, and they made a video to explain what is going on. I’ve got to say, Jimmy at Castos has been very helpful.

In Seriously Simple Podcasting there are two menu options for All Episodes and Add New Episode. Both work with a custom post type for podcasting, so if you are starting from new you would create a new episode and it would appear in All Episodes. But I have existing posts. What I didn’t know is that I can forget about these two menu options as I won’t be using them.

In Podcasting –> Settings –> General, I set Posts in the list of podcast post types, and this gave me a section at the bottom of each post called Podcast Episode Details, and this is what you fill out. For existing posts, it had a stab at trying to create the URL for the audio in the Episode File field but added some extra text to the back of the filename, which meant it couldn’t find the file. I had already noticed this and corrected it. For each post I selected the episode image, duration and date recorded. It is the recording date which was important because I created the text for the first 40 episodes in April and May but started recording in July, this had led me to change the post publish dates which is not good practise for SEO.

There was another setting on the General page called Enable iTunes fields. This creates an extra four fields in the area at the bottom of each post, the episode number, episode title, season number, and episode type (full, trailer, bonus). It is to have control over multiple seasons, and an episode number which originally led me to find out how to handle this, and that was when I got to hear about the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin.

The 90 podcast episodes I have planned will teach people what Maximo can do for them. If you are going to use the podcast episodes to learn about Maximo, then there is a definite order you need to follow – episode number was therefore important. There will be sets of episodes, you can think of these as chapters, and the chapters have a specific order as well. In podcasting terms this would be multiple seasons, the first season would be Asset Management, and I will soon be starting season two – Maintenance Planning. The other change I needed was to make sure the podcast was treating the episode as a series, and not episodic which is the default, and which orders episodes in a reverse chronological order. I don’t want the episode order to be nullified by showing the latest episode first.

With all the details filled out for the first twelve episodes I bit the bullet and set the new RSS feed from Seriously Simple Podcasting in Apple Podcasts Connect and waited an hour and then there was more detail than we had before. It had created season 1, ordered the episodes the way I needed them and now showed the episode artwork. I’ll see in a couple of weeks when I start season 2 whether this is working out OK.

I had issues with Google Podcasts and Spotify in recognising the new RSS feed. I made a support call to Spotify, and they were helpful, but I think I was a bit impatient and decided to remove the WordPress RSS feed details, which for Spotify meant I had to create a new podcast from scratch, so I lost my viewing statistics, only small numbers as I only went live on the 1st August. By Sunday night Spotify was back working with the same ordering as for Apple. On Monday Google Podcasts came back but it shows the episodes in the normal format of the latest episode first, perhaps Google Podcasts does not support a series order, I’m not hopeful it will manage season 2, but we will wait and see.

There are a couple of blocks added by Seriously Simple Podcasts. One is the Castos player which has a nicer layout than the audio block and gives users a single click to subscribe to the podcast on their chosen platform, it also shows the episode artwork as a thumbnail. The other is the Podcast List which shows the latest list of podcast episodes. I am making use of both new blocks.

Now that I could control the episode through the recorded date the other thing I did was returned the first 10 posts to their original publish date and this corrected another nagging issue the ordering of posts in the Latest Posts block.

With Apple Podcasts working, I also installed two other plugins, I had promised myself that I would not install the next plugin until I had the previous plugin working. These two plugins are to control the Modified Date on Posts, Pages and Projects. The ‘WP Last Modified Info’ plugin displays the last modified date. The ‘Limit Modified Date’ plugin gives you a checkbox on your posts which will allow you to control whether the last modified date gets updated, which you probably would want to set if you just fixed a link or corrected some typos. Both seem to be working OK.

The reason I need these plugins is because my articles are relatively timeless, what I wrote five years ago would still be 99% accurate today, but the images will be out of date because the user interface of the Maximo software changes over time. Over the winter I want to start the process of reworking the articles where I get the most hits, also adding in what I learnt from the SEO course; hence I need to be able to show visitors when the post or page was last updated.

When I look back at the objectives for week 38 there are a fair number which will roll into next week. I did publish the twelfth video and podcast episode but I didn’t record the remaining two for the Asset Management series, in fact I realise now that for the last two while I had added the intro/outro music I hadn’t narrated the intro and outro text, so there will be some reworking of those episodes, it shouldn’t take long and would be a good test to see if the podcast platforms are receiving updates through the new RSS feed.

Over the last two weeks I have written a new post but not quite managed to complete and publish them with the changes needed to improve the SEO. I still haven’t completed the trial of PowerDirector 365, and I still haven’t unboxed the new Lavalier microphone – if only I had a spare day.

It doesn’t look likely that I will make room for that spare day next week, perhaps I’ll be able to do some catch up the following week as I will be working away for the first time since the first Covid lockdown, 30 months ago.

The objectives for week 39 are:

• Publish the thirteenth podcast episode and video using normal workflow
• Record the fourteenth podcast episode and video. I’ll edit and publish the following week. This will complete the Asset Management series.
• Select a new piece of TrackTribe music for the second series Maintenance Planning.
• Create and publish a post using what I learned from the SEO course. Ideally the two that I’ve written.
• Complete the exercise of reproducing the 10th video using PowerDirector 365. I really do want to be using this when I start series 2.
• Do some test recordings with the new Lavalier microphone which I want to use in series 2.
• Investigate plugins that will provide a wider range of blocks to use.
• Find out how I am going to track posts, pages, and projects that I’ve updated to improve SEO. This will require me to mark all posts with a tag that I can update, allowing me to also find those posts that I have not yet updated.
• 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.

A lot to do, again, and no doubt I will not achieve them all, but I do not want to lose sight of these, as they are all important.

It was a good week for the Maximo Secrets statistics, the first week where I had exceeded 1100 views on each weekday, Monday to Friday. I also broke the 7K views for the week, setting a new high-water mark of 7,163 views.