By Chris Harris
A Normandy holiday, three hours arguing with Chat Bloody GPT, podcasting disasters and small social media victories. Another week of learning, frustration and gradual progress.
The podcasts are proving to be my absolute Achilles heel, and I know exactly who to blame for this, and it’s certainly not me. It’s Chat Bloody GPT.
We were in France, in Normandy, at a beautiful medieval town called Domfront. We were staying in a lovely rustic brocante-style house with a beautiful garden and view. It was an outstanding four days away to draw breath, except I made the ultimate mistake of taking down the new Rode microphone.
I reasoned to my wife that we could maybe just find an hour at some point to work out how to get it going properly and nail the podcast once and for all, as having been through the process before a number of times, and in a needlessly complicated manner, we still hadn’t found a satisfactory formula.
If you don’t use artificial intelligence, you probably won’t understand, but your AI through your computer talks to you like you are friends. Some of the time anyway. Most of the time it just fires back your requests. But after three hours on a Saturday afternoon, because you have this stupid relationship, the worst thing is, you end up shouting at it and berating it. A bloody computer!
And in this case it did come back and it said these very words: “Yes, it’s not been my best of days. I do apologise.”
So let’s briefly explain.
We are trying to reconfigure the microphone with Audacity and the video on my phone. Remember, I am completely reliant on ChatGPT to do this. I’m someone who’s technically fairly hopeless, but I’ve worked out a system of screenshots where I will take a photograph, and ChatGPT will tell me what to do.
Now sometimes this works out brilliantly, and things that are normally really difficult to resolve will resolve just like that. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an outstanding piece of equipment.
But I’m beginning to suss it out, and as I was losing my rag with it, I did say to it, “This is the easiest way of doing this, isn’t it?” As I had obviously already instructed it to do the simplest method of getting a podcast going.
“Oh no,” it told me. “No. This is the best way of doing it. It’s not the quickest.”
Now you have to remember I’m setting up a very unslick campaign to promote my book. I’m not actually trying to run some high-fashion retail conglomerate trying to sell expensive goods through high class advertising and content. I’m just trying to get people to buy my self-published book.
So after three hours, it agreed. “Well, what we’ll do—”
“This is the most complicated method,” it told me, “and I’ve done this because it’s how you’re going to get the best sound and video,” which is fair enough, except, as it agreed, it just sent me down so many rabbit holes.
Because basically if it can’t work something out, it tries all the methods that are available to actually get it to work, rather than just say, “I can’t do it.” So it continues persevering and drags you along with it. This is just part of how it works, and I think I’ve mastered this now. And other stuff I’ve done subsequently, I’ve just hauled it over the coals and just said, “No, this is just too complicated. You’re getting this all wrong.”
Yes, this is the stuff that’s due to take over the world.
Anyway, the upshot was last week when we came back, ignoring ChatGPT’s suggestion that maybe we try again the next day, and last week, using Clipchamp, ChatGPT finally showed us a very simple method for doing a podcae recorded our first podcast with the microphone and video on Clipchamp, a hundred times easier than Chat had previously suggested.
That’s just part and parcel of setting all this media stuff up. Some stuff’s easy, some stuff’s really easy, and some stuff is insanely complicated and frustrating.
I’ve still not put them on the two podcast channels, which I will attempt in the next couple of days, that’s going to be a ball of confusion locating the sign in’s etc. However, the first one is recorded and is fully stored, ready to go out. So hopefully that’s going to be the last really big complication.
This week I’m going to be focusing on reconstructing my main blog, not the one for the book, which we’ve been working on and currently is what I would call a satisfactory standard, but nowhere as good as it can be, but fully working.
Then the fun of updating my main blog, my blog called The Rights of Fans, which is actually quite a popular blog.
But it basically was originally set up as a non-league blog for Lewes Football Club. And as my interest in that has waned, I’ve started writing lots about other subjects, but it’s still presented as a football club blog.
So I need to correct that this week, tentatively naming it, He Knew He Was Right. I keep chipping away at other things all the time whilst we’re trying to set up blogs and podcasts and sort out another proof of the book. We keep piling content onto social media, while working out new tricks.
For instance, I now put links to my blogs and short stories onto my Instagram bio. These are really simple things, but because I didn’t even know what an Instagram bio was, I had no idea how useful it was, and people who use Instagram just take it for granted, a great tool and a few minutes to work out.
So that was one new thing. I made my first video where I speak to the camera and tell a short story. With social media, you can post it with a photograph with a link and, say, get 50 people to look at it, or you can put the same link with a video and you’ll get 500 people to look at it. So it’s just picking up all these useful tips.
On Substack, I had no idea about Notes, basically a Bluesky-type Twitter where you post short presentations and links to your material. A few minutes to work out.
I’m continuing to improve on posting on all five of the social media channels at the same time, and I put the book on Etsy and put a link to it on all of my listings.
And this is what I’m finding every week. There are just new ways to gradually upgrade and improve. Over the next eighteen, three or four new ‘tricks’ will add up to three hundred, and who knows how effective this could be for my social media. Or mot as the case may be.
We’ve nearly been doing this for three weeks now, and on all channels, apart from Facebook, I’m picking up followers, and I have to say, he says guardedly, improved traffic. I’m beginning to understand how things work better.
So, for instance, I’ve been blown away by the number of views I get on TikTok, but when you look at the actual details on the stats, one video showed 450, but actually it’s clearly just people scrolling through, because it shows how many people watched the full video, and bear in mind it was only about 10 seconds, the number was zero.
But I did get 17 likes on one of my videos, so…swings and roundabouts.
Even more encouraging was receiving a message from TikTok saying that for my number of followers, I’m getting 90% more likes than other new users. But let’s face it, I currently have three followers. Ha ha.
Anyway, it’s good to get away for the weekend and begin to gradually get on top of things.
I’ve got my diaries now, and so far they haven’t been the enormous success I’d hoped, but I think they will in time because I’ve just got so much going on. It’s akin to moving into a house, you need to sort out the basics and the mess before things run smoothly.
I’m now in the process of writing three books, and I’m starting to do something called Quick Reads, which are short, short stories, if you get my meaning, and they are just short stories with a twist in them, and they’re very quick and easy to write, and they’re a very good form of content creation.
However, they are not connected with Denham, I’m going to attempt to do one a week. In a couple of years’ time, I may well have a fourth book.
It’s been another week, and another week where I feel I’m starting to get a bit more of a grip on things. Improved organisation, improved understanding, and a pretty good increase in views.
