This time last year (Christmas Day) I joined the Podcasting for Beginners course and set about documenting my journey, and now I am one year in and about to start my second year. In the second half of the year, I took another path on the journey, I started a YouTube channel and become a videographer, and for anyone who has been following this journal you’ll find notes on my attempts to update my website in preparation for installing a learning management system. I opted for Sensei Pro, the LMS from Automattic and the one currently being used for the WordPress courses.

My last year’s New Year’s resolutions have consumed me. I did start a second, personal blog, and midway through the year I had to decide which to keep going and I chose the Podcast Journey. I hope some people find it useful.

It was a short week this week, as it was for many. I was working for some of it, and I really wanted to catch up with a few items on the transcripts for the twenty-two YouTube videos. These now have Captions and Alternative Text on each slide image, something which I learnt should be the case from the SEO course. In the transcript text I also replaced numbers in parenthesis, for example (1), (2), etc with an inline image of the number, in white text on a solid red circle, this aligns with the same symbol I had on the images. The resulting .PNG files for each inline image are quite small and so there has been no discernible degradation in the speed of loading each post.

I felt the formatting of the table of contents at the top of each post could be improved. I wanted to add the word Contents above the table, and I felt that both this paragraph and the table of contents block would benefit from a background colour. The issue I faced was that there was a white space between the Paragraph block and the Table of Contents block and no fiddling with the margin or padding could remove this. I tried adding it inside a Group block, but this didn’t work initially. I added a radius to the Group block, which was nice, but the background exceeded the boundary of the Group block which now had a border. So, I removed the two blocks from within the Group block, got the background colour working correctly and added back the Paragraph and Table of Contents blocks and now there was no white space between the blocks. I am not exactly sure what is going on here, but I think it has something to do with the ordering of the blocks. Next time I come across something like this again I will add the Group block first, get that formatted correctly, then add other blocks into it.

I did have a need to call the Happiness Engineers as ideally, I wanted to remove the underlining of each item in the table of contents. The Happiness Engineer produced the following code – but it removed the underscore on other links that were not in the table of contents, so I reversed out the code. /*remove underlining on table of content | SN-38121037-hc*/ .wp-block-post-content a:where(:not(.wp-element-button)) { text-decoration: none; }

The other item I had on my list to do over the Christmas period was to catch up on the podcast episodes. I did record and edit five of the missing nine episodes and published two of these so that I could see on Apple Podcasts that a second series had been started. I was more than halfway through a long recording of the next episode when the family returned from a walk and there was now too much house noise, so I’ll abandon this for a quieter time next week, hopefully on my first day back to work.

I’ve been giving the online courses I aim to create in 2023 some more thought and it occurred to me that I should seek some help from a book. I opted for ‘Teaching Teachers Online’ by Simon Galloway (ISBN – 9798414098263) – A practical guide to planning & running effective online teacher training. My logic for choosing this was if the book is designed for teaching teachers, then it must be useful, it was also quite cheap.

The book is not always relevant because teachers have a cohort of pupils in each year group where a large part of the day will be some sort of activity that consumes trainer time, whether face to face classroom, online seminar or marking of course work. The book is focused on school or university training.

The online courses that I am looking to create must be achieved with minimal trainer time, so that my time can focus on the creation of more content. This begs the question of how I achieve knowledge sticking with my students, and how do I keep them motivated. The answer to these two problems, it seems, invariably involves some activity requiring time from the trainer.

I am only a third the way through the 300 pages and I will get to the end quickly, and then revert to the beginning picking out the items that will be relevant to the type of courses I aim to create, for example I really ought to document the aims of my course.

I have concluded that I need to start a glossary of terms to support the online courses I aim to create. I posted a question to this week’s Feedback on the WordPress Community asking what was used in the SEO course. Andy replied with a plugin called Glossary glossary.codeat.co/ I have a couple of follow up questions – did you use the Free or Pro version and did you compare with the Glossary available from Automattic. Hopefully, Andy or someone else will provide an answer as installing a glossary plugin is something which I will do in the next couple of weeks.

I do have a slight concern with the use of a glossary in that I will easily have over 300 terms, perhaps double this. Some terms will get used many times in a post and I wouldn’t want the post looking so populated with highlighted text that it becomes annoying to the reader. The other consideration is if I had 300 terms, I wouldn’t want to create 300 posts, one for each term, perhaps one post for each used letter of the alphabet, but no more than this. No doubt I’ll need to install one of the glossary plugins and see what it does, what I like, what I dislike and what might be useful in another plugin.

So, what will be my objectives for next week, week 53?

• Record the remaining four podcast episodes, edit, and publish so that I now have one for each YouTube video.
• Start preparing and ideally record the next YouTube video.
• Update two old posts with updated images and add captions and alternative text. My aim is to update two posts each week (at least) to the newer user interface of Maximo.
• Start preparing the objectives of a new set of videos for Asset Management which will be the first online course. These videos will be of a type that demonstrates features of Maximo which I have already discussed in the existing videos and podcast episodes.
• Create a set of ten quiz questions for the next lesson, this will be a weekly activity.
• Research a glossary plugin

I am determined that the next YouTube video will use PowerDirector 365 which I purchased a couple of months ago and that for the following video I’ll be using the Lavalier microphone which remains unboxed from the Summer. New year, new targets.