Saturday, April 16, 2022
5:10 a.m. Phannu House Room 1102
Mae Sot, Thailand
I’ve been very busy with technology lately. I guess that shouldn’t come as a surprise. For one thing, I decided to do a Premiere on YouTube. I had never done one before, which meant I had to dive into the technology of it and figure out what Premieres were all about and how you set one up.
My main idea for doing this Premiere was to use this format as a way to present my series of Sukhothai videos. I wanted to take those six or seven videos and present them as a kind of special event, and make them distinct from any videos I might be making currently in real time. Otherwise, it might be weird to post one Sukhothai video, then a Mae Sot video, and then go back to a Sukhothai video. By making all the Sukhothai videos Premieres, it should help separate them and keep things less confusing.
I also have seven or eight videos from my return to the Mae Hong Son Loop. And my idea is to present them as a special event as well through Premieres. And once I post all the Sukhothai and Mae Hong Son Loop videos, I can settle back into a normal rhythm.
Part of my inspiration for finally doing this was watching a Premiere from Paddy Doyle. The announcement of this upcoming Paddy Doyle Premiere just happened to pop up in my YouTube feed. In fact, it was about to start in fifteen minutes when I saw it. And I decided to watch it so that I could get some understanding of how it worked and what a Premiere looks like. I learned a few things. I learned, for example, that you can have your video simply start at the scheduled time, or you can insert a short intro with a countdown. Paddy’s video had a countdown.
Beyond that, I kind of learned (or at least got a sense of) what I DON’T like in a Premiere. Paddy’s video was very short. And I didn’t like that. It felt like it was over practically before it started. Considering the grand tone of the concept and the very word premiere, this short video felt anti-climactic. Paddy also did not contribute very much, if anything, in real time. A lot of people tuned it to watch the video with him, but I got the feeling that Paddy himself wasn’t really present. It felt like he was absent and was only pretending to be there. I’m not sure I remember him adding any useful observations or answering any questions. Every few minutes, he posted a set of emojis. He alternated between a series of small pictures of a scooter and small pictures of himself. These popped up every few minutes, but that is about it. And it felt to me that Paddy was busy doing something else while the video played, and he just got on the keyboard once in a while to post some emojis and then he went back to his other activity, whether he was watching a movie, making dinner, or napping, or whatever.
I also wasn’t a big fan of the video itself. It was short, but it was also somewhat surface-level. In fact, it felt like a trailer or commercial for the real video that was going to come later. In this Premiere, Paddy talked a lot about what was happening or going to happen in his life. He and a special subscriber were on their scooters and making their way from Bangkok to the island of Koh Tao. But instead of showing much of that journey, Paddy was on camera talking about it. And my sense was that the real video about this experience was going to be posted later. This Premiere was essentially serving as an announcement or advertisement for the real video, which was coming later. At least that is how it felt to me. And my feeling is that it should be reversed. The Premiere video should be bigger and grander. Why else is it a Premiere? So I thought that the video that Paddy posted as a Premiere could have been posted as a normal video. It could have been the trailer or announcement for the bigger video, the real video, and THAT video could have been the actual Premiere.
I ran into a few things that I had to figure out as I set up my own Premiere. If you wanted to, you could set a video to post instantly as a Premiere. Underneath “Publish Now”, you choose to set the video to Public, and you tick the box that reads “Set as instant Premiere.” If you do that and save the changes, the video will start to play instantly as a Premiere. If you want the Premiere to start at a set time in the future, you choose the “Schedule” option as normal, but you tick the box that reads “Set as Premiere.”
Plus, as often happens, the YouTube mobile Studio app is more limited than the full version online. With the mobile app, all I could do is set the time for the Premiere to start, and that’s it. Yet, I had seen the countdown screen on Paddy Doyle’s video. I saw nothing about that when I tried to set up the Premiere on my phone. So I got out my laptop, and I went to the full YouTube Studio through the Chrome browser, and that is where I found more settings. I could choose to have a countdown or not. I could choose the length of the countdown. And I could choose what type of video plays during the countdown. YouTube offered a list of animated screens based on different themes. And I believe music played during the countdown as well. But it turns out that you could also insert your own countdown video. You could record your own message, for example, perhaps an introduction to the upcoming Premiere, and that video message will play with a countdown clock overlaid over the top. If I have time, I will try that next time.
The next issue I ran into is that when I set up my first Premiere, it didn’t seem to work. I assumed I would see the video announcement on my YouTube channel. But it wasn’t there. I was expecting to see the video thumbnail along with a schedule for the time of the Premiere. But I didn’t see anything. So I thought I had made a mistake, and I went back into Studio and removed it so that I could try again. But I heard in a few minutes from a friend that it HAD actually worked. My friend had seen the Premiere announcement, but then it disappeared when I removed it.
After some digging around, I learned that the problem, once again, was the mobile app. On the mobile version of the Studio app, the videos were listed by the date that the video was uploaded, not by the date the video goes public. My Premiere announcement thumbnail was there, but it wasn’t at the top of the list. It was buried way down the list of videos. Other people saw the Premiere announcement at the very top as the latest video on my channel. But I didn’t see that.
I finally worked through all of this, and reposted the Premiere. This time, I went to my channel on my Chrome browser, and there I saw the Premiere as other people saw it. It had worked. And it looked great. A friend of mine then helped me figure out a few other things. The main thing I was interested in was finding out about the Live Chat. After all, the Live Chat was the whole point behind a Premiere. Without the Live Chat, the Premiere is just a scheduled video. Therefore, I wanted to make sure I understood how the Live Chat worked. I was very pleased to find out that the Live Chat window is active from the moment you schedule the Premiere. Therefore, if I set a video as a Premiere to start 24 hours from now, I could be chatting with people inside that Live Chat window from now until the time the Premiere starts. My friend posted some messages in the Live Chat window so that I could see them and figure out how to reply to them. I thought people would take advantage of this and post some messages in advance. And then I could chat with people in the hours or days leading up to the Premiere. And people could do that, but no one did. I don’t think people are used to using Premieres that way.
I also learned that in order to reply directly to someone’s message, I had to do it manually. I assumed I would be able to click on their message and reply directly to it or click on the three-dot menu and reply. But that isn’t possible. To reply to someone, you have to type the @ symbol and then start typing their username. The system will suggest the right username, and then you can click on it. And that should insert my reply with the username of that person highlighted. I found it to be a bit clunky, and during the Premiere, it definitely was not ideal. It was too slow. But at least it worked.
I also wanted to write a little introduction message and somehow add it to the Live Chat window. And the way to do that was to write your message as a normal chat message and then pin it to the top. Unfortunately, I ran into trouble there, as well. I tried and tried and tried, but I was not able to post the message. When I hit the arrow button to submit it, nothing happened. It just sat there and nothing changed. I eventually figured out that there was a 200-character limit, and my message had exceeded that. When I shortened the message to below 200 characters, I was able to post it. As often happens with YouTube, I was surprised at how primitive and unpolished this was. I didn’t even get an error message when I tried to submit my original message. Normally, I would expect an error message to pop up informing me that my message was too long. But even though YouTube and Google have about a billion computer programmers on staff, it never occurred to anyone to add this error message. The system just leaves you guessing and floundering as you try to figure out why nothing is happening.
I was very excited about this Premiere, and I also posted an announcement about it on the YouTube Community tab and on Facebook. No one really reacted to those announcements, though. A few people “liked” them, but no one left any replies to my announcements. And no one dropped any messages into the Premiere Live Chat window, even though it was open and active.
I scheduled the Premiere for 7 p.m. local time here in Thailand. That might have been the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do. It’s hard to say. When, in theory, your audience is spread out over the entire world, it is difficult to say which time is best for a live event. When it’s evening here, it’s midnight or three in the morning somewhere else. So, which time do you choose? I guess if 90% of your audience is in one country and one country only, you would cater to them and select a convenient time based on their time zone. But if your audience is spread out everywhere, what do you do? I defaulted to using the local time zone.
My learning curve continued to be quite steep as the time of the official Premiere launch approached. As expected, my energy levels dropped dramatically as seven in the evening rolled around. For my personal convenience, morning is better for everything. I’m always at my best in the morning. I knew I would be exhausted during the Premiere if it started in the evening or night time. But I figured that was most convenient for people in Thailand and Malaysia. I panicked a little bit when the countdown didn’t appear to start. I had chosen a countdown period of three minutes (which I think turned out to be far too long). And at 6:57, I expected the countdown to start and then continue until the official video start time of seven. But nothing happened. I assumed the worst and thought that I had made a mistake.
But it turns out that the countdown starts at the official start time you set for the Premiere. So even though I scheduled the Premiere to begin at 7 o’clock, it didn’t really start until 7:03. The countdown started at 7. And the video began at 7:03 when the countdown concluded. So everything worked out in the end.
And I have to say that in general, the Premiere was a success. It was surprisingly successful, and I enjoyed myself very much. Over sixty people were shown as watching for pretty much the entire length of the 1-hour video. And a number of people joined the Live Chat and contributed some thoughts there and asked questions. I answered as many questions as I could. My goal was to answer all of them, of course, but I might have missed a couple in the excitement. I also tossed out my own commentary throughout the video. I thought of my role as a bit like someone doing an audio commentary for a movie. I was a bit unsure of how much of that I should do. I didn’t want to be posting so many things that it would be distracting from the main video. Perhaps that would annoy people. So I did curb my instincts to post tons of comments. I posted a few. And as the video went along and more people left comments, I had less time to add my own unprompted commentary anyway. I got pretty busy.
And to my great surprise, three people used the SuperChat feature to contribute some money to keep the whole Planet Doug dream alive. This was something else that I was confused about. In doing my research, I learned how to turn on the SuperChat and SuperSticker features on my YouTube channel. I hadn’t turned those on before now. But in so doing, I discovered that these features didn’t work in Thailand or Malaysia. And, indeed, when I looked at my own upcoming Premiere Live Chat window, I saw a dollar sign down at the bottom. And I could click on that dollar sign, and it opened up a menu where you could give money through these features. But both SuperChat and SuperSticker were greyed out. The system informed me that my region – Thailand – was ineligible. However, it appears that it isn’t quite so simple. The system was saying that since I am physically in Thailand, I can’t send anyone money. The feature won’t work for me. But apparently, it will work for other people in other countries. And three different people sent me some money with a SuperChat. I believe these people were based in Norway, Canada, and the United States. And the total came to $53 by the time the Premiere was over. Considering the state of my life at the moment, that money is extremely welcome. I also learned that YouTube wants their piece of the pie. To my surprise, I learned that YouTube takes 30% of any money that flows through SuperChat and SuperSticker. I don’t understand business at all, but I have to say that I’m surprised at how high that percentage is.
And that is nearly the end of my Premiere story. I was hoping that the Live Chat window would stay open and active for a period of time after the video ended. But it didn’t. It pretty much shut down and closed as soon as the video ended. So there was no possibility of hanging out in the Live Chat after the video and talking to people. It felt somewhat abrupt to me. I plan to do many more Premieries now. As I said earlier, I want to present all of the Sukhothai videos as Premieres. The question is how frequently to do it. I have six more videos queued up, and I don’t want to spread them out over too long a period of time. If I posted only one per week, it would take a month and a half to reach the end. That’s too long. I’d like to do three per week. But that could be too many. Two per week?
I’m thinking about scheduling the next one for Saturday night (which is tonight) or Sunday night. I think Sunday night will be better. Tonight might be too soon for the next one. And I was thinking about going to the night market tonight.
And believe it or not, that is just one technology adventure of the last little while. I also went through the process of establishing a Planet Doug website. My stress levels have been through the roof about this. It’s not like the world of website hosting and WordPress has been kind to me. My experience with websites has been nightmarish from the beginning until today. And that is no exaggeration.
However, the idea of having a Planet Doug website was there in my brain, always nibbling away, and I couldn’t get rid of it. I wanted the website for all the reasons one would normally want a website. I also thought of using it as a home for my journal-style ramblings, such as what I’m writing right now. But I also wanted to be able to establish official and dependable Planet Doug email addresses, including one that I could use for PayPal. There are a lot of moving parts here, and it remains a work in progress, but the idea is that a person who wanted to help fund my Planet Doug adventures could potentially use PayPal to send money. But I don’t want to use my main personal email address, which is the one that I used to set up my PayPal account. It is impossible to spell. However, I think you can add additional email addresses. Your real personal email account will always be the one that your PayPal account is connected to. But I think you can add additional email accounts. Therefore, if I have a Planet Doug website, I can then create a Planet Doug email address through that domain name, and then I can add that email address to PayPal. Therefore, people could send money via PayPal to an official Planet Doug email address.
This is a long technological road to go down, and it is fraught with peril. But I am taking it step by step and I appear to be making progress. The first step was to establish the Planet Doug domain. Unfortunately, the .com top-level domain was already taken. I can’t use that. I contemplated a range of options. If I absolutely wanted to have the .com, I’d have to do something fancy with the name. For example, I could add a word and use ThePlanetDoug as the domain. Or I could add dashes or an underscore. But none of those options appeal to me.
The other approach is to choose a different top-level domain. The standard and classic ones are possibilities. I could use the .org, .info, or .net domains. But I don’t like any of those either. I could also use the country-based top-level domains. The Canadian .ca option for Planet Doug was available. The .co option was a possibility. I ran some ideas past other people, and Daryl from WanderEats came back with the suggestion that I use the “life” top-level domain. I didn’t even know that was an option. And at first, I didn’t like it. The word life has certain connotations for me. And I wasn’t sure that I liked those connotations. But over time, I started to get used to it. And the clincher turned out to be this idea that since life is an actual word and not just a random set of letters, it could be used in fun ways. For example, there is the concept of the Planet Doug Life. I’m living the Planet Doug Life. And then it is kind of fun that the website would have the “life” domain extension. People might not be familiar with the word life in an Internet address, but maybe that’s okay.
The other issue is that fancy top-level domains, such as life, are more expensive. The standard .ca domain would cost about $17 per year. And I think the .life domain is going to cost about $40 per year. But I decided to go for it, and I bought it. GoDaddy gave me a deal on it for the first year. That’s another reason I got it. I could buy it for the first year for about $3. And then at least I would have it locked up as an option. I could still decide not to use it. And the higher price of $40 would only kick in after a year. And if I decide I don’t want to use it, I would just cancel it before payment was due.
And once I owned the domain, I slowly worked my way through the steps of turning it into an active WordPress website. First thing was to point the domain to the nameservers of my hosting company. That process seemed to work out okay. I don’t think anything went wrong, and I left it for a day or so to “propagate”. The next step was to add the domain to my account at my hosting company. Things got a bit trickier there because the system is so antiquated, and you have to mess around with concepts like addon domains and subdomains. And that can be very confusing. Logically, you’d think you could just add the domain as another domain. But the way the Internet and cPanel work, you can’t. You have to have one main domain. And at the moment, my main domain is still TheCyclingCanadian. And in order to use the new Planet Doug domain, I have to add it as an addon domain or subdomain of TheCyclingCanadian. It’s counterintuitive and feels very strange and pointless, but that is the only option. And I get very confused about addon domains and subdomains and what the differences are between them.
After fighting through all the support documents and guidelines and manuals, I came to the conclusion that the proper procedure was to add Planet Doug as an addon domain. And I did that. And that seemed to work as well. I ran into two problems off the bat, though. The first is that the domain came up on the Internet as unsecure. This is something that I’ve been struggling with for many years. My TheCyclingCanadian website has always been listed as unsecure. When anyone visited that website, they got a scary warning in the URL saying that this website was not secure and that you should not enter any sensitive information there. They warned that hackers might try to steal your data. I always wanted to fix that problem, but I was never able to figure out how. And this same warning came up with Planet Doug.
I hunkered down and started to do the research, and I started reading about SSL Certificates. And I discovered that my hosting company now offers free SSL Certificates. It’s included with my hosting account. And it appeared that I had to manually install this certificate on my domains. And once I successfully did that, I would be able to use the secure https protocol as opposed to the unsecure http. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. And this comes into effect when you add the domain. As part of the process, you have to select a protocol. And now that I had successfully installed the SSL Certificate, I was able to choose the https protocol.
I was very happy with this small success in my life of technology. However, there was a second problem. When I visited my own websites, they still came up as unsecure. With the SSL Certificate installed and using the https protocol, there should be a reassuring padlock in the URL. That padlock is the sign that you can trust this website. It says that any information that flows between your device and this website is encrypted and cannot be intercepted. But my websites still had the warning sign. Instead of a padlock, it showed a triangular shape with an exclamation mark inside it. And when you hovered over that to get information about the website, it told you that it wasn’t safe and that hackers might be able to intercept anything you communicate with this website.
After a lot more research and reading, I discovered that the SSL Certificate took effect only when people loaded the website through the https protocol. If they happened to use the http protocol or a link that brought them to the website through the http protocol, the SSL Certificate didn’t work, and the website remained vulnerable to hackers. This made no sense to me, of course. Why is there even an option? What is the point of using a secure protocol and adding an SSL Certificate when people can just ignore it and still visit the website with an unsecure protocol? It’s like putting a huge padlock on the door to your hotel room, but then right beside it is another door that is wide open and has no lock at all. The padlock on the first door is great security perhaps. But it’s useless if there is a second door right beside it that is wide open.
After much more research, I learned that the solution to this dilemma was to force all traffic to use the https protocol. There appeared to be various ways of accomplishing this, and I can’t say that I fully understood what I was reading. For example, the hardcore approach appeared to be to insert several lines of code into your .htaccess file. And that sort of thing is still far beyond my skills and knowledge. I don’t want to mess around with inserting lines of code. That is simply inviting disaster. As soon as I started reading about how to do this, I ran into an endless stream of terminology and vocabulary and instructions that I didn’t understand. I read that you had to do it one way if your website was on an Apache server and do it another way if it was on a different type of server. And I didn’t know if I was on an Apache server or not. I also found a simple switch inside the cPanel that offered the possibility of forcing the https protocol. But when I tried to use it, it told me that for mysterious technical reasons, it wouldn’t work. Finally, I found a two-step process that appeared to work. I can’t even remember now what the first step was, but it was somewhere inside cPanel. And the second step was to add a plugin through WordPress. And this plugin automatically did everything that was required to force traffic through the secure https protocol. I would normally be very suspicious of doing something so important with a random plugin. But my hosting company strongly recommended it. I installed the plugin, and I activated it. And though I understood very little of what it did or even what it told me, it seemed to work. TheCyclingCanadian website and the new Planet Doug website both now showed a reassuring padlock in the URL. Both were secure.
Confusion still abounds, however. When I go into cPanel (where I understand very little), I see that PlanetDoug has the https protocol. But TheCyclingCanadian is still listed as being on http. Yet, in browsers, it is delivered through the secure https protocol. If that’s the case, why does it show as being on http in cPanel? Shouldn’t it have changed to https? I don’t know.
The other element of confusion for me is that even though I feel like I did everything normally, the Planet Doug files are in a completely different place from all my other files in cPanel. I honestly have no idea how websites work. I’m just fumbling around blindly inside cPanel with my fingers crossed. However, I noticed that all my domains are listed underneath some kind of public.html folder. They’re all there except for the new Planet Doug domain. For some reason, it is listed in more of a root folder above the public.html folder. But I don’t know why. Why is it there when all my other domains are somewhere else? It makes me think I did something wrong. I might send an email to my hosting company to ask the experts to look at it and tell me if it is okay.
To back up for a minute, I also had to install WordPress on Planet Doug. I’ve had very bad experiences with this in the past, so I approached this carefully. Everyone tells me how easy it is, but there have been major problems in the past every time I’ve done it. In this case, I spent days reading about the process. There were step-by-step instructions provided by my hosting company. But the instructions were terrible. They didn’t troubleshoot or explain anything. For example, there were many windows of information that you had to fill out. And their idea of explaining things was to say, “In this window, you name your database.” And that’s it. They would say nothing about what database they were talking about, why you are naming it, what kind of name to choose, what is the significance of this name, why one name might be better than another, or when you would actually need to use this name. There was ZERO information or help. And this was the case with multiple windows.
And every time I encountered one of these situations, I had to spend the day doing my own research to figure out what to do. And for some of them, I never found an answer. I was never able to get past this point, in fact. But yesterday, I decided to just do it and see what happens. I didn’t understand the process, but it was clear that I’d never understand it anyway. And to my surprise and frustration, all of the troublesome windows were irrelevant. In fact, they weren’t even there. In the instructions, they said that I would have to name this database, for example. They also said that I would have to decide on what prefixes to use for certain database elements. And I had no idea at all of what they were talking about. But when I actually started the WordPress installation, NONE of those windows were there. I didn’t have to name the database. I didn’t have to choose prefixes. The installation process was completely different from the one they outlined in their help documents. And all these things that I didn’t understand and was so worried about never came up at all.
My next project, after installing WordPress, was to dive into the world of email addresses. My experience there was very similar to WordPress. For weeks, I’ve been reading about how email accounts work when you have websites through a hosting company. My hosting account apparently comes with unlimited email addresses. I can make as many as I like. But no matter how much I read, I could not understand how the system worked. I’d come across an unfamiliar word or concept. And in trying to understand that word, I’d come across five more words I didn’t understand. And each of those would be defined in technical terms with five more concepts I didn’t understand. I ended up diving down deeper and deeper into this endless rabbit hole of technological terms, and I never came to the end of it. I’d just go around and around in circles. And by the time I came back up for air to work on this email address, I’d understand even less than when I started.
I eventually reached the point where it was clear that I was never going to figure out what they were talking about. I had no choice but to simply start clicking on buttons and hope for the best. And just as with WordPress, all the issues I anticipated were not real. The guidelines talked about all these things I needed to do and understand to create an email account and email address. Yet, when I actually did it, none of those issues came up. They just weren’t there. I didn’t have to do anything. Creating an email account was as simple as clicking on one or two buttons and you were done. So I don’t understand why all the “help” documents made it so complex.
I’m still not done, of course. I’ve learned something about the email system. But I still have a ways to go. The main thing I need to do is somehow establish a connection between my new email account and the outside world. It’s one thing to create a domain-based email account in cPanel. It’s another to be able to access this account from my smartphones, tablets, and laptops. How do you do that? That’s a whole other kettle of fish. Sure, someone can now send an email to that functioning email address. But where do you go to actually read this email? Where is it? No one explained that. A friend of mine has given me some advice here, and though I don’t really understand it, I have a starting point. He recommended using an email client called Spark or Sparkmail. And I guess the idea is that you download the Spark app to your smartphone. And then you connect the app to the email account you created in cPanel.
It appears that I can access that email account right now through something called Webmail. And I can use Webmail through cPanel or any browser on any device using two programs called Horde and Roundcube. But it appears that using an email client, such as Spark, is more convenient. And I think I can use Spark to receive email from several different email addresses. It is like a collecting device. It will assemble emails from several different email addresses and put them all in one place. At least I think that is how it works. I haven’t installed it yet. I’m still trying to figure out which email client is the best one to use.
I’m kind of exhausted now. But on the positive side, I didn’t run into any absolute disasters or deadends. Disasters and deadends is how my technological adventures usually end. Despite the struggles I faced, I seem to have made some progress. Of course, I’m still far from finished. I now know how to create an email account using my new Planet Domain. But I still have to decide what to call this Email account and Email address. And then I have to get it up running with an email client. And then I have to add it to PayPal and get it to work there.
And then there is the whole question of what to do with the Planet Doug website. I have a million ideas for what I would like to do with such a website. But having an idea is a lot easier than implementing that idea. I generally struggle with anything to do with WordPress or websites. The gold standard, perhaps, is something like the website that Itchy Boots has. That website is gorgeous and so polished and so professional and so functional. However, it appears to have been custom built and maintained by a well-paid professional company in the Netherlands called RD Media. That’s what smart people do. You don’t try to build and maintain your own website. You pay professionals thousands of dollars to do it for you. There’s a reason why corporations have large and expensive IT departments. Normal employees can’t be expected to do their own jobs AND maintain the servers and computers. It takes entire teams of trained professionals to do that. But as a YouTuber, you kind of do everything yourself. It’s not very realistic, to be honest. But if you want a website, you have to do it yourself unless you have the cash to pay a company to do it for you. On the positive side, I like to do things myself. It’s part of the fun. But in this case, the time commitment alone might be unreasonable.
I have many more thoughts on my brain, but the day is underway, and it is time to get started with something else. I think my first task for today will be to set up the next Premiere. I’m pretty excited about that. I think I will schedule it for Sunday night.