It was a short week for me this week as we are on our holidays, back before Christmas and the expected start of the UK Border Force strike.

Last week I had started preparing the next video, but I didn’t even get to record it. All I had to do this week was complete the last two slides, record and edit, but as it is likely to be a long video the recording and editing won’t get completed in a day, more likely it will require two, then the work on publishing the transcript and doing the YouTube captions always takes longer than you think.

As it turns out I was being optimistic, and I had resigned myself to not publishing a video for at least two whole weeks. Then, on our journey up to London Heathrow airport I received an email from BA to say that they had cancelled our flight and had placed us on one early the following day, but not to the same airport but three hours’ drive to the west, which for us was completely in the wrong direction. We did manage to book a later flight to our original destination the following day and then we had the job or rearranging taxis, letting hotel know, etc. We’ll lose one day of skiing.

Fortunately, I had decided to take my laptop with me so on Thursday I managed to get the video published with captions and added the transcript to my website. It was six minutes longer than the previous longest video, coming in at over 46 minutes. It is naturally split into three, I do hope anyone attempting to view the whole thing will take a couple of breaks. Strangely it was 50MB smaller in file size than the previous longest at 40 minutes. I’ve not had a chance to investigate the reason for this.

I did get to install a diffuser to the key light. The diffuser must have been a design afterthought because it was very fiddly, and the reason I have not yet installed the second one. It was cold when I recorded the video, we were going through a cold snap in the UK and a stone-built house is not a warm house. Consequently, my face was a bit white, and there was little sign of pink in my hands, I’m going to have to focus on getting a bit of a tan in the mountain air and must avoid the panda eyes.

That’s it for this week, but it is around this time I start to think about New Year’s resolutions and some of these do involve things that you can associate with my website. For instance, this time last year I had just received the offer to join the WordPress Podcast for Beginners course, at the time this was a fee-paying course. I subscribed on Christmas Day and week 1 of the New Year was week 1 of this Podcast Journey, so I’ve nearly completed a journal for an entire year for the first time in my life.

The main aims next year are as follows:

• Continue with the weekly videos. I’ve produced 22 to date in 26 weeks, so a reasonable target will be to get to 65 of the current style of video by the end of 2023, another 43 videos.
• If there are 65 videos, then this should mean that I have 65 podcast episodes, but I’m going to push that target out to 80 episodes, this will require me to write the next 40 transcripts, as I already have the first 40. I’ve decided that I will record five or more episodes at a time and release them to the podcast platforms in batches.
• I will look to complete the first two Sensei courses which will have a total of 27 lessons. In the first half of the year, I will look to just run this internally but in the second half I will look to having paid subscriptions.
• The Sensei courses will require me to develop another type of video, one that is demonstrating the Maximo product. I’m thinking that each lesson will have on average two short videos, each probably no more than 5 minutes in duration. The target for this will be 270 minutes of a 2nd type of video.
• I’ll complete the facelift of the Maximo Secrets website in the first half of the year. This will include a static home page, and a footer, but I’ll also need to complete the excerpts and featured images for each of the pages created recently each containing a group of posts.
• I’ll also start the update of the images for existing posts, so that they are captured in the new user interface of Maximo. These posts will have a table of contents, image captions and alternative text, excerpts and in several cases, a featured image will be required. This project is expected to take two years, next year the target will be to update half of the 300 posts, 150 posts to update.
• There are three Portfolios I created more than two years ago: Maximo Overview, Modules and Application Maps. These need to be updated as I need them as a high level for the Sensei courses, I will also need another overview of Maximo Application Suite, for which Maximo is one part. The two overviews will each have a video, or a set of videos, a total of 90 minutes in the same style as the current YouTube videos I’m creating.
• There will be new features released during the year and I aim to write posts for those of a functional nature, I tend to keep clear of technical aspects, configuration, and integration new features as this is often handled by others. A part of this will include an update to the posts I created previously for the Maximo Mobile product, which has expanded in scope in the last year. This time the screenshots will be from a mobile perspective. I expect about 15 posts during the year.

This is all massively ambitious, but it is now a large part of my day job. I’ll keep reflecting on this over the next couple of weeks, to see whether this feels an achievable set of targets, then I’ll split it down into a first quarter target and one for January.

There is only one objective for Week 51, which reflects that for four of the days I will be on holiday and there will be preparations for Christmas:

• Start the update of the 22 existing YouTube transcript posts. They each need a table of contents, and the images need to be replaced with a .PNG file type rather than .JPEG which doesn’t have as good a resolution. The images also need to be set to full width instead of large.