[00:00:10.340] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:10.730] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:11.150] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:13.160] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:15.410] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses in the last seven days. And we have an announcement to make. Yes, it is the results of our giveaway. So a couple of weeks ago, we set a giveaway up and you had to just go to a page on our website and it was free to enter and we have the results. So Taylor, first of all, would you like to tell everyone what your giveaway was? And then we'll do a little drum roll and we can announce the winner.

[00:00:53.720] - Taylor
So my giveaway prize was a year free hosting from me. So that was for any website. And you've got a year for free.

[00:01:04.220] - Gordon
And let's have a drum roll. And the winner is...

[00:01:09.230] - Taylor
Emma Chard-Cumming.

[00:01:09.260] - Gordon
Yay! Well done Emma. That's amazing. We know Emma and she's a big supporter of this project that we do. So thank you very much and well done to you.

[00:01:20.660] - Taylor
We will get in touch with you to let you know that you have won.

[00:01:24.080] - Gordon
Yes. And my giveaway was one year of Drayson Design reviews, a system that allows you to get feedback and testimonials very easily on both Google and Facebook and other places and then display them on your website. And... The winner is Caroline Ainslie. So well done, Caroline. I will be in contact with you. Congratulations. Someone else we know quite well, that, someone else who is also very, very good at commenting. Thank you for that. And then...

[00:02:01.010] - Taylor
We have one more prize, which was the, whoever got the closest to how many minutes, seconds or hours we have in total of all 52 episodes from the past year. So not including the previous two episodes, but the 52 before that.

[00:02:20.810] - Gordon
And that was just for the audio because the video has sort of headers and sort of times at the beginning. So not including that, so we went for the audio only and you had to put your guess in the comments. And the person who, well shall we tell them what the actual, so go on.

[00:02:41.090] - Taylor
So the prize is a 30 minute consultation with either of us, or both of us, whatever you prefer. And the total time was 18 hours and 16 seconds.

[00:02:56.420] - Gordon
And you have no idea how long it took us to figure all that out. Honestly, we were trying to do it or Taylor was trying to do it with code to try and add all the times together. And just it wasn't happening, so we put it into a spreadsheet and got the time from that. So... The winner of that, the person who got the closest was Hayley Rose. So congratulations to you. And we will be in contact to see how we can help you with the consultation. So thank you very much, if you joined in our giveaway. Never know, we might do another one in the future.

[00:03:35.360] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:03:35.660] - Gordon
You never know. So, topics for the... Well, is there anything that's affected you this week, in fact? I know there was some downtime for lots of big websites.

[00:03:45.620] - Taylor
Yeah, I saw that. There was a company that people use for, they're basically CDN, which is basically distributing your website across the world, really. So it's quicker to reach wherever you are in the world. And they had a kind of a big downtime and this caused lots and lots of websites to go down.

[00:04:09.050] - Gordon
Amazingly big websites as well. It's amazing how many websites, you know, big websites relied on this particular service.

[00:04:18.440] - Taylor
So it could be quite detrimental to the company. However, there's a couple of takeaways that I actually saw on Twitter. The first was giving good error messages because the error message that people got was very ambiguous and very, well not helpful at all if you are a visitor. So something that I saw people say was, you know, make sure the error messages that you give are useful because, you know, as a user, you might think it's you and your connection and it's not something that's actually the website issue and...

[00:04:51.890] - Gordon
Good point. Yeah.

[00:04:53.000] - Taylor
So yeah, making sure, you know, it's possible to understand what it is. Obviously, the people that are developing will know because they'll have error logs. But for the people that visit the website, making sure they kind of are in, give them something to do, so maybe "check back later," in a couple of minutes and also tell them what's the actual issue that it is, so if it's a server or a website issue, or if it's your connection or something.

[00:05:17.570] - Gordon
Yeah, and what's really interesting is that some of the sites that are affected were sites like Amazon, Financial Times, New York Times.

[00:05:26.740] - Taylor
Government, U.K. government.

[00:05:27.850] - Gordon
U.K. government website went down.

[00:05:30.220] - Taylor
eBay I think.

[00:05:31.060] - Gordon
eBay, Spotify, Netflix. There's a whole host of household names that went down. And you're right, having a proper message to show what's actually happening and that it's not you, it's them, is really important. That's a really good point. It is back up again now, but it was down for a few hours, in fact. So quite, you know, if you're Amazon, for example, imagine how much money they lost in those few hours from people not making orders.

[00:06:03.340] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:06:05.110] - Gordon
Probably more than you and I make in a lifetime.

[00:06:08.600] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:06:08.950] - Gordon
Yeah. So what's your topic of the week Taylor?

[00:06:11.890] - Taylor
My topic for this week is search functionality. So I mentioned a while ago that we improved the search of our website. So we added it to the home page.

[00:06:21.970] - Gordon
On "This Week With."

[00:06:22.990] - Taylor
Yeah, on our "This Week With" website and I've gone and improved it again. So, this time, basically, when you search, you get a dropdown that basically is inside before you go to any page, so it gives you kind of results like you would get for some other websites, and things like that and like suggestions. And we had this, however, it wasn't very useful because the length of the search box and the length of our titles, because of the way that we format our titles, we have "This Week With Taylor and Gordon: Season 2 Episode 43" or whatever. And this is the title of our website or our episode. However, it's not very useful if you're searching, and it doesn't really give you any information about...

[00:07:08.980] - Gordon
Well it just tells you that there's something that you've searched for in that episode, but it has no context does it?

[00:07:14.530] - Taylor
Exactly. So what we've done is we've changed it so that it returns just "Season 2 Episode 43, or whatever the title is. And then it also returns a highlighted snippet of your keyword that you've searched for. So if you searched for 'Evernote,' it will show you where 'Evernote' has appeared in that kind of episode, in the either transcriptions or in our kind of show notes.

[00:07:37.720] - Gordon
And then it's got sort of like the sentence that the word is in, so you can see sort of in what context it's being talked about. So if we've spoken about it several times, you can see which episode you actually need to look at, or watch, or listen to, to find the information you're looking for.

[00:07:56.050] - Taylor
Yeah, exactly. And it just hopefully will be helpful for people that want to find out what the episode's about before having to, or find the episode they're looking for without having to click into it. We had something similar on the actual episode grid that we have, is you have the 'more info' button that shows a lightbox of our show notes, which can be quite useful if you just want to quickly scan over and say, "is this the one I want?" Before having to actually click into it and find out more.

[00:08:21.890] - Gordon
Yeah.

[00:08:22.870] - Taylor
So, yeah, that's what I was working on. And also we had a kind of thumbnail image just to give you a bit of colourful imagery.

[00:08:29.500] - Gordon
Yeah. You mentioned transcripts. I'm going to talk about that next week because we are doing some things with that as well, which is quite interesting. I'm not sure how many people use the website. Probably not many, but the things we're learning from it are actually really useful to us to then take into other projects and other websites. So this search functionality is going to be really, really good for other sites. I've got one in particular I've got coming up, that I know that this will be really useful for.

[00:09:05.140] - Taylor
Yeah. And you know, I was reading about it because obviously I was doing more research into this kind of search functionality, and the website, well the plug-in that I was using to get the main kind of just the 'Ajax,' which is basically for, without having to reload the page results, kind of search results. They said that a lot of websites have, get improved visitor, kind of click through rates because of this instant feedback and being able to quickly find what you want easily. You know, before that, it was kind of very difficult to find out the bit of... If you heard on the podcast audio, you may not know what episode it was that you heard it on, but you know the snippet or word that we said in that episode that you can then go searching for now. But, you know, if you're running an e-commerce site or if you're running a blog, for people to be able to try and search for it, it's very, very useful. You know, you can even add, go as far as adding a 'add to cart' button in the dropdown so people can just add that product straight to their basket, without even having...

[00:10:06.340] - Gordon
From the search results.

[00:10:06.970] - Taylor
Without even having to visit the actual page.

[00:10:09.510] - Gordon
If they know they want it, and they just want to check out quickly, which is great, really good.

[00:10:13.860] - Taylor
So it can increase the conversions, you know, not just for podcasts, but conversions for any other type of website that is beneficial to having lots of content that is needing to be found quickly.

[00:10:25.110] - Gordon
Well done. Really good.

[00:10:27.720] - Taylor
So yeah, that's what I was working on.

[00:10:28.890] - Gordon
Very good. And I notice you've got your trucker's cap on today.

[00:10:31.740] - Taylor
I do indeed. I have my very own limited edition 'Permaslug' hat, which Jonathan very kindly sent to me. Jonathan is a friend of mine in America, in Florida, and he runs a web design agency over there. And he also has kind of another side business where he makes tutorials and has a course on kind of building websites with the software that I use. And I'm good friends with him, and he sent me one of the hats.

[00:11:03.120] - Gordon
And he sent it to you, I'll tell them why, he sent it to you because you have come up with various solutions for problems and shared them with him. And he's then made a video about it. And so they both work really well together, and it's, it was a nice thing to do. So, Jonathan, if you're watching, thank you very much. Taylor thanks you, I thank you.

[00:11:27.630] - Taylor
We'll put your link in the description.

[00:11:29.370] - Gordon
Yes. So he's got a course that teaches people what?

[00:11:32.240] - Taylor
So yeah he, the builder that I use is called "Oxygen," and he basically has a step by step guide, basically course, on how to get started with Oxygen, how to use it, giving different examples, so using it with an e-commerce platform. And also using advanced custom fields, which is another plug-in that basically allows you to add metaboxes and fields that is easily fillable for your clients and stuff like that.

[00:12:00.030] - Gordon
So we'll put a link to that course in the show notes. And if you're not sure, you know what episode it is in the future, all you need to do is use that search box and you can search for it. Search for the word "Oxygen."

[00:12:14.880] - Taylor
Or "Permaslug."

[00:12:15.750] - Gordon
Yeah. Cool.

[00:12:17.490] - Taylor
So yeah, how about you this week?

[00:12:18.900] - Gordon
So I thought I would show you a few of the things that we've been printing. We mentioned several times now that we've got a new 3D printer. It's actually going right at the moment. It's in the background. So if you hear any sort of weird sounds, that's what it is, printing. But I thought I would show you a couple of things that I have printed with this so that you can see what we've done and what we're doing. So at the moment, we're just getting used to the printer and its capabilities because 3D printing's very, very new to us. We've only been doing it for two weeks now, two weeks today.

[00:12:54.600] - Taylor
Three weeks.

[00:12:55.230] - Gordon
Two weeks, two weeks today. So this is something that I found on 'Thingiverse.' So it was already designed, in fact, it's got a name here, which I can't read, but they've managed to, "Tulio..." I can't read the last bit, but it's been designed by him or her, and all you do is you download it and you print it out. And this print came out extremely well. I chose to do it in black because it's a marble run, and I thought it would be nice to have the silver marbles going down and they would then catch the light. So at the top here, we've got four different paths that the marbles can choose to go down, and there's a big hole at the bottom and all of these ramps go down to the bottom of the central column and then in at the bottom. So, you then need this, which is an Archimedes screw, which has come out extremely well. I mean, that is just beautiful, isn't it? The finish on this. This is a silk PLA plus. So that goes in there like that. None of these prints had any supports. They just printed as they are, which is just amazing. It's a testament to the designers really. Then there was a cap and there's the four upright struts and you just put the cap on top of there, that then stops the Archimedes screw from coming out. And last of all, you have this turn-y handle, which goes in the top there. And if I show the, there we go, what's the best way? There we go, if I do that? If you look at the Archimedes screw, if I just turn it, you should be able to see the Archimedes screw is turning. And I've got a couple of balls, so let me see, I'm going to put one in here. It's supposed to be flat, so I may not be holding it flat enough for it to work, but we'll see how we go get my finger out the way. Oh, there we go. So it comes all the way down, goes back in again; comes all the way down, goes back in again. If I get it halfway up, I can take another ball and we'll put it down this one this time. Good view for me that time. And now we have two balls in there, and you just keep going and it brings them back to the top, sends them down different paths depending on where they come out at the top of the Archimedes screw. So that is great. I love marble runs anyway, but that actually came out extremely well. The next thing is a gift, in fact. It was my partner's birthday yesterday and I gave her this little gift. And again, this is something that I didn't design, but what's fascinating about this is, it's a heart with three cogs in it. And if I turn this bottom cog, you'll see that the cogs are actually working. And it's all one piece. The cogs don't come out. And it was printed as one piece. I didn't have to do anything. All I did was take it off the hot bed at the end, once it cooled down, and it was like you see now. It had been created as an all in one unit, which is quite amazing. And what I've done is I've written "Love Gordon" on the back because it was a present. That's the only bit I added, putting the wording in there. But it's got a little hole there, so you can put it onto a keyring if you want to do so. And yeah, it's a really nice, simple present which is sort of unusual, but also functional. And the last thing that I have to show you, I'm going to take it out of, there we go. Last thing I have to show you is this. Now, this was printed today, in fact. This took nine minutes to print and it's for this which arrived in the post. And this is an Apple Airtag, and I had it engraved with my initials on the back, so I know it's mine because I have a feeling in the future there may be a few of these in this house. And the print was again available just to download and the actual Airtag itself, I'll tell you what it is in a second, but the actual Airtag has no way to hook it onto anything. So by printing this holder, I've now given myself space to put it onto a keyring if I want to put it on a keyring or, you know, lock it to something to keep the thing, keep the Airtag from moving. So this Airtag is tiny. You know, if I put it up against my hand, you can see how small it actually is. And what it is, is it's a tracking device. So you can put this into anything you like. This one in particular is going in my bag that I keep my cameras in and the the tracker will emit a signal for a certain distance, and anyone who goes by with an iOS device, the tracker will tell that iOS device where it is, and that will tell a central database so that if anything gets stolen that has a tracker in it, all I need to do is go on to my phone and do "find my" which is useful, useful for things like laptops and Airpods and phones and iPads, and now, airtags. So if I lose my my camera bag, I just need to go on to my phone and say, where is it? And as long as somebody has been near it sort of recently, it will tell me where it is. And in fact, if you are close enough, the phone will actually direct you directly to it. And we tested that didn't we Taylor?

[00:19:06.430] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:19:07.180] - Gordon
So this morning when this arrived, I gave it to Taylor and I said, "go and hide it somewhere in the house or the garden." And you did.

[00:19:15.470] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:19:15.920] - Gordon
And how long did it take me to find it?

[00:19:18.900] - Taylor
Two minutes.

[00:19:19.830] - Gordon
So in two minutes, my phone found the Airtag. I didn't have an actual sort of starting place, so what it was saying to me is, "I can't connect to it, just try moving around." So I just walked around just a little bit until it connected, and it connected while I was in the kitchen. And it was like, it gave me an arrow saying which way to to go. And there was a wall in the way. So I realised it was probably the other side of the wall. So I went outside and there it was hidden away in a hat in the carport. And I managed to find it really, really quickly. So I have four of these, and I'm going to put them in various different things that I want to keep track of. And if I were to lose them, I now have a way of finding them. And it's all protected nicely in the 3D printed holder.

[00:20:11.910] - Taylor
Sounds great.

[00:20:12.640] - Gordon
Yes. So that's all I have for you today. Anything that you'd like to add?

[00:20:17.910] - Taylor
No, that's everything.

[00:20:18.180] - Gordon
Good. So thank you very much for joining us. Congratulations to our three winners. We will be in touch with you. And if you've enjoyed this episode or any of our episodes, then please like, share and subscribe and comment on YouTube or Facebook.

[00:20:36.720] - Taylor
You can also go to our website: thisweekwith.co.uk. And you can find all of our past episodes on there.

[00:20:41.940] - Gordon
And search through them as well, even better. So until next week, we will see you at one o'clock on Friday. My name is Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:20:51.420] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:20:54.090] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:20:54.490] - Taylor
Bye.

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Show Notes