The week started as normal with the priority to produce the next YouTube video and podcast episode, the thirteenth in the series on Asset Management. When I started the week, I knew I needed to see if I could record two videos and podcast episodes as I will be away from the green screen and microphone next week. I’ll be able to do the editing but not the recording.

I scheduled the thirteenth episode on YouTube for Friday 10:00AM which allowed me to get everything prepared and published both on YouTube and on the Maximo Secrets website. The post that contains the embedded video, transcript, and slides, indicated that it was private on Thursday and then this was corrected after it had gone live at the scheduled time.

When I came to do the recording of the fourteenth video and the last in the Asset Management series, it was raining the whole day and the light was not perfect, and trying a few lamps just cast shadows, so I waited for a period when it was a little lighter and recorded the video. Piecing it together and then trying the green screen removal I soon realised that you need to have decent light. I tried a few settings, and managed to get something acceptable, but I now know that I need to be getting my credit card out again for some studio lights. I might get away without them for a few weeks but with the daylight hours quickly diminishing I know I will need them sooner rather than later.

At the end of last week, I realised that the last two podcast episodes were missing the spoken intro and outro. I recorded these and edited them in on the two episodes plus the one that I hadn’t yet published. A couple of hours later I checked on Apple Podcasts and the new recordings had come through OK. I don’t know why but a couple of days later I also checked on Google Podcasts and Spotify and while Google was playing the new episodes, Spotify was still playing the old episodes, the ones without the spoken intro/outro. I’ll have to investigate why this is the case.

During the week I watched the recording of the Fearless Theme Switching Workshop, it was very useful, and it did look as if it was easy switching themes. Moving to a new theme seemed to be the next step as I really want to be on a theme that supports full-width as I have a lot of screenshot images and videos which will provide a better experience if the images were larger as long as there is no loss of image clarity.

In the research I had been doing I was looking at moving to the Astra theme, then implementing the Elementor website builder plugin, before moving to a Learning Management System, LearnDash seems to work well with both Astra and Elementor. The other thing I was looking to do was to add a plugin that provides a wider range of blocks. I posted a question to the community – What are my next steps? where I laid out my thoughts and asked what my first step should be.

Tanya replied with some very useful insights. What blocks do I think I am missing? I should be considering a Full Site Editing theme rather than a website builder. If you do go down the route of a website builder you are no longer able to use the WordPress editor. If you go with a third-party theme then the WordPress.com Happiness Engineers will not be able to support you. The more plugins you have the more likely you are to find a conflict especially if those plugins do not come from Automattic.

My assessment of this after giving it quite a lot of thought was if you are a one-man (or one-woman) band with no budget then you will need support and so you had better just stick to themes and plugins that come from Automattic unless there is no good alternative. This was the case for handling podcast episodes in multiple seasons and which are supposed to be listened to in series, chronological rather than presenting the latest episode first, hence my use of the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin.

As suggested by Tanya I had a look at Automattic’s Sensei LMS for the Learning Management System. This seems not to be quite as functional as LearnDash but then I do not need to decide yet, I don’t have the content created and I may be a year away from making anything public. There is a free version to get started and there is Sensei Blocks which for a small monthly fee provides a small array of blocks that provides question blocks, interactive videos, image hotspots and flash cards that would allow you to ask a question on one side of a card and give the answer on the other side. All these blocks sound really good for handling training courses.

When I was considering the answer to the question what additional blocks I need, I found it a difficult question to answer. For me I really need to see the blocks in action before deciding which ones I would make use of and which not. I am pretty sure I would make use of all five Sensei blocks, but what else? It’s a good job I didn’t spend hours thinking of this because on closer inspection of the current plugins I discovered a plugin called CoBlocks, installed as part of upgrading to the Business Plan and which provides a lot of additional blocks to investigate.

Midweek I did a trial run of switching to the Russell theme, a Full-Site Editing theme with additional features like Bundled Fonts and Custom Menus and within 20 minutes I had tried out the fearless theme switching, and I was back on the Rowling theme. The main issue was that the menus had disappeared and the first few featured images of posts were really poor quality, others further down were crystal clear.

Tanya provided some tips and a useful video, the menus you need to import. So, at the weekend I did a lot more preparation and then did the theme switching again, but after about four hours I was back on to the Rowling theme again.

I had been in contact with the Happiness Engineers who I have found to be very useful whenever I have need to call them. The main issue I ran into which is a known issue is that you cannot control the text colour of submenus. As my menus are dark, I really needed to make the text white, black or dark grey text could hardly be seen.

The second issue was that I couldn’t change the text colour of the main Maximo Secrets title. After I had returned to the Rowling theme I got a message to say that as the Title has a link you needed to use a different setting, so this is not an issue.

The third issue was back to the poor quality of the first three featured posts. The Happiness Engineer said that these were being displayed at 400px x 400px although the images are stored in the media library as 3000px x 3000px. I’m not entirely sure this is registered as an outstanding issue, but by then I had dealt with three different Happiness Engineers, and I had concluded to abandon my trial for the day and dive back onto the Rowling theme, which with one adjustment for the menu was back how it was at the beginning of the day.

Fearless theme switching has been proven, but I still have not managed to change themes and my window of opportunity will not come back until early November, hopefully by then the fix to the menus would have occurred.

I am not overly concerned by the lack of progress on changing the theme because currently I don’t have a static home page and so I can implement this on the current Rowling theme, rationalise my menus a little more and switch themes a bit later. I could also explore other FSE themes to see if they overcome some of the issues, the Russell theme seemed to be good because of a couple of features like bundled fonts and custom menus, but I don’t know I need this.

The WordPress stats have been steadily rising since the middle of August around the time Google announced a change to their search engine algorithms to favour quality over quantity. I create original content and never reuse content found elsewhere, so with a bit of luck my website will be a beneficiary of this.

It is almost impossible to judge whether I have been a beneficiary, particularly because at the beginning of August I launched my YouTube channel and podcasts. This year I have been monitoring progress on my website by counting the number of weekdays when I go over 1000 views. Well, the 6 weeks prior to 14th August I managed it 18 times out of 30 weekdays. For the 6 weeks after it was 25 times out of 30. I had exceeded 1300 views on a single day only 6 times prior to 14-Aug, since then 7 times, 5 times in the last two weeks. I don’t think this is just down to my YouTube work, but the new SEO algorithm kicking in.

I am writing this when Week 40 has actually come and gone and I am slipping behind in My Podcast Journey. So, it seems a bit silly setting my objective for week 40 when I know what I did. I am working away next week, so I know I won’t achieve very much. Nevertheless, this is what the objectives would have been:

• Publish the fourteenth podcast episode and video using normal workflow, the last in the Asset Management series.
• Prepare the content for the 15th video the first in the series on Maintenance Planning although I won’t get a chance to record it until Wednesday of the following week as I will still be away from the green screen.
• Select a new piece of TrackTribe music for Maintenance Planning.
• Discuss with my management team what the next steps should be and whether I do need to pursue the Learning Management System path.