[00:00:10.430] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:10.970] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:11.390] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:13.250] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:15.470] - Gordon
And welcome to this Week with Taylor and Gordon, a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected us as self-employed businessmen over the last seven days. And welcome back. Thank you for joining us. It's getting cold, isn't it?

[00:00:30.350] - Taylor
It is, very cold.

[00:00:32.750] - Gordon
We've had a few very cold days. Last week I had a bit of a cough and that cough is still with me today. So apologies if I have to cough, I will try not to. Anything interesting in the news today?

[00:00:48.350] - Taylor
Nothing really in general. Kind of, I don't really watch the news too much so... Only kind of tech news that I ever see.

[00:00:56.570] - Gordon
Well that's the tech news I'm talking about. People can watch the TV or listen to the radio if they want to know the news. I mean, things that have affected people that might be self-employed.

[00:01:06.170] - Taylor
Nothing from me then.

[00:01:07.010] - Gordon
Nothing from you? Okay. I don't think I have anything either. So let's get straight on to our topics. Do you want to start?

[00:01:14.690] - Taylor
Okay.

[00:01:15.170] - Gordon
All right.

[00:01:16.130] - Taylor
So my topic this week is "Random Website Generator." So this was a project that I started and, it had been built, I just needed to polish it off and just design it. The kind of core fundamentals and functionality were working. And yeah, so I decided that I would finish it off and it would be possible to add it to my website under 'my projects' since that's now kind of been launched. Well, it's gone live, but it's not fully live. I'm still working on it, but I needed it to be live to be able to work on some of the integrations. So this random website generator is, it's like a, you click a button and it will generate you a sentence and it will populate different parts of the sentence with different things. So you could have a medical contact page with a gallery with the Hex colour of F46BJ.

[00:02:16.070] - Gordon
Oh, you don't want that one.

[00:02:17.030] - Taylor
No? I don't know what colour that is, but you could basically generate...

[00:02:22.070] - Gordon
Over F, J is never going to work.

[00:02:23.450] - Taylor
No. But yeah, you could generate a random sentence or you can then click it again, generate a random one. So maybe an electrician homepage...

[00:02:34.850] - Gordon
So do you want to explain why you would need this and then you can go into how you've done it.

[00:02:39.770] - Taylor
So it's for people that kind of are trying to get into building websites. But it's very difficult to create your own kind of briefs and kind of ideas for practice websites. I struggled a lot with this when I was first starting out and I know a lot of people in the Dev community do struggle with it. So we built 'Oxy Build Challenge,' which is a challenge once a month that we give you a brief and you kind of submit your work and then people judge and vote on them. And it's really really good. But obviously that's only once a month so people might want other ideas. So it's a place that people can come to to generate a random idea and then build a website from it. People can then submit their own ideas and options. So you could submit your own type of feature, your own type of categories so like industry, or you could submit your own kind of page type. So whether it be like a home page, a landing page, contact page, anything like that. And so it's all generated from community submissions. And then it just randomly generates and picks one of the options.

[00:03:53.270] - Gordon
So the colour is randomly generated. You can't suggest a colour, can you?

[00:03:56.390] - Taylor
No. So the colour is a function that I found online which allows you to generate basically any Hex colour, which is what websites use for kind of creating for colours and just generates a random Hex colour and then shows that on the front end.

[00:04:16.070] - Gordon
So it was working before. What have you added just recently?

[00:04:19.850] - Taylor
I have a lock functionality so that you can generate a sentence and then you can lock certain options. So you could say, "okay, I like the option of it being a lawyer site, but I don't want it to be a contact page. I want it to be something else." Or "I don't want to use the function, the feature of a gallery," for example, which you may have got a lawyer contact page with a gallery which isn't going to be very useful. Might be quite interesting but may not be very useful. So you can say, "I like lawyer and contact page, but I don't like the feature of gallery. So I want to roll again." essentially. And so that's one of the functionalities. And yeah, you can generate any of them you want really.

[00:05:04.790] - Gordon
So by clicking on one of the items, it will lock that and when you generate again, it will generate everything that's unlocked.

[00:05:10.490] - Taylor
Yes.

[00:05:11.150] - Gordon
Okay. And that's what you've just added. Is it?

[00:05:13.910] - Taylor
Yes. So that was part of that I thought it might be quite nice for people that don't want, want to roll again, but don't want to have to write it down or want to be able to keep going until they find something they do like.

[00:05:25.850] - Gordon
Okay. And people can also add their own suggestions?

[00:05:30.650] - Taylor
Yes. So that was one of the other things which I spoke about a second ago, which is you can add your own options to the database, essentially. So you can put in what page type, feature or category you want. I then get an email, I can then approve it and then it gets added. And then when anyone uses the generator, they can see everyone else's options that can get picked.

[00:05:56.090] - Gordon
And there are some funny ones that come up, aren't there? We had a plumber contact page with the colour brown which...

[00:06:06.710] - Taylor
Yes... Would be interesting.

[00:06:08.570] - Gordon
Yeah. But you know, that's what random generators do. And I thought this might be quite a nice idea to use for my improv as well. So have people be able to suggest a location or a relationship or just a random word. So I might ask Taylor to do something like that for me that I can then use and take on to my improv classes, which will be quite cool.

[00:06:36.470] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:06:37.610] - Gordon
Anything else you want to say?

[00:06:38.870] - Taylor
No, I think that's everything. But I think it came as a suggestion from you originally. You saw something online for something else similar and you said it'd be a cool idea for a website generator. I have ideas of what I could do with it. It's just trying to figure out what's possible and how it would look really.

[00:07:03.330] - Gordon
So we'll put a link in the show notes, but how do people get to it?

[00:07:07.110] - Taylor
You can go to random.oxybuildchallenge.com.

[00:07:11.310] - Gordon
There you go. Using a subdomain. Very good.

[00:07:14.070] - Taylor
So yeah, that's everything from me this week.

[00:07:16.110] - Gordon
Okay. So my topic this week is about maintenance and updates of websites. Now we have spoken about doing this and how important it is. But in the old days and I say the old days, like the early days of the internet, used to have HTML, and that was pretty much it. There was no CSS, there was no JavaScript. There was CGI. CGI bin folder, which was Pearl, which was the language that used to be used if you wanted functionality, but that was pretty much it. And so when you built a website, the website would go online and it was not really updated ever, because people didn't have the skills to be able to do that. And so it was put online and it was left online for 10/15 years. However long. There's probably websites, well, there's definitely websites out there that are still built just in HTML and probably Pearl with CGI. But these days people want more from their websites. They want to see animation, they want to see video, they want to see nice designs and interactive elements and forms and... The list goes on, galleries. So the software that runs websites has become a lot more complicated and a lot more complex. And because of that, you get problems sometimes. So you could have, for example, if you're using WordPress, which is the most popular platform to build your website on. And if you're thinking of building a website, WordPress is definitely the one I would choose because there are so many people out there who know how to use, how to write for, and how to develop WordPress, that it's by far the best option for you if you want to make sure that your site has longevity. But because you have this WordPress platform, you have plug-ins, and a plug-in is basically an extra functionality for your website. So if you want to have a form, you have a plug-in form and there's thousands of them. If you want to have social media, you have a social media plug-in. If you want to create a CRM, which is possible now, which you know, couldn't even consider back in the day, then you add a CRM plug-in, and there's so many different things you can add, and the developers of these add ons will keep developing them. Well, the good ones will. We were talking about this the other day. If you pay a premium for a plug-in, the chances are it will be developed and updated and security issues will be fixed, and you'll get support. If it's a free one, well, yes, it's a lot cheaper, but you have no idea as to what's going to happen with it. Some free plug-ins are developed and updated more often than premium ones, but not a lot. Quite often those free ones will have a paid version or a premium version that is getting updated and so the updates are rippling down to the free version as well. But we always recommend if you've got a website that has a specific function you need it to do, then get a premium plug-in for it, because yes, it will cost you money, but you also have a pretty good feeling that it will be kept up to date.

[00:10:57.810] - Taylor
Yeah. So we don't always recommend plug-ins for everything. I think that premium plug-ins are, or plug-ins in general are good for not reinventing the wheel essentially. If you need something that's already out there, you might as well use something that, like we said, is supported and updated. But sometimes what you want isn't out there or it's close to what you want but not exactly. And sometimes it can be more of an issue to use a plug-in and try and warp it to how you want it, rather than just doing it from scratch.

[00:11:32.670] - Gordon
Yeah, agreed.

[00:11:33.150] - Taylor
And like I said, you can still have a WordPress website without plug-ins, but a lot of the stuff you do will have to be fully custom and built by you, which is kind of the alternative side of using a plug-in or using someone else's plugin essentially.

[00:11:51.270] - Gordon
So the downside to building this functionality yourself, or having it developed for you, is that when the next version of PHP comes out, which is the coding language and the base that these websites will run from, they will add new functions, they'll deprecate functions, which means that they'll basically remove features from the software. And if it's a feature that your website relies on, all of a sudden your website's broken. So you didn't do anything. It's just the hosting company, or the people that you pay to host your website will have updated the software because it's going to be faster, it's going to be more secure and so on and so forth. And by doing that, it breaks part of your website. So it's really important that you check your own websites regularly. Now, there is software out there which I use, which basically will alert me if something changes on one of my websites. Now, if I'd made that change and it alerts me, that's fine, because I know that that alert was because something I did and not because of something else. But if you've got a website that you don't change or update very often... Excuse me. [Coughs] Pardon me. And you get an alert to tell you that something's changed. It probably means there's been an update that you had no control over and it's broken something. So if you've got software that does that, great. If not check your website once a week, okay. Or more often. We spoke about this before. E-commerce websites, check it once a day. If it's a really busy website and you're not getting orders in for some reason, something's broken. Now the maintenance and updates are really important. You do not want to leave your website with plug-ins that don't get updated, because flaws and security issues are found in older plug-ins, and they can be accessed, and people can then break into your site; they can hack your site; they can deface the site, they can put up words and links to porn sites, to their own websites, to Bitcoin websites, finance. All sorts of things that you do not want happening to your website. So not updating is not a good option.

[00:14:35.390] - Taylor
No.

[00:14:35.390] - Gordon
There's a lot more that can go wrong with your site as far as hacking goes, if you don't update it than if you do update it. Having said that when you do update, you could also find yourself with problems. You could have conflicts that go with two different plug-ins that are trying to do a similar thing, and there's an overlap of functionality and the way that the update has happened on one has then encroached on the other plug-in, and so they're not playing nicely together. And then you've got to sort of turn plug-ins off until the problem goes away to figure out which plug-in is causing the problem. And then you can either contact the developer and say, "look, I'm having a problem with this. Can you look at it?" If it's a premium plug-in and you're paying for it, you're normally getting support, so that is a good option. And that's one of the reasons we recommend premium plug-ins. If it isn't a premium plug-in, you may need to go and get a different plug-in that's not going to cause a conflict, but we highly recommend doing maintenance. The other thing we highly recommend is to back up your site, which we have spoken about in the past. And the reason for this is that if your site does get defaced or hacked or an update has broken it, you've got a backup of the site. So you know what it was like when it was working, and therefore if you need to, you can reference that. You can give it to a developer and say, "look, this is a working version of the site." You can replace the site that's currently online with your backup going back to a version that was working before you updated a plug-in and it stopped working. Many, many reasons why you should have a backup.

[00:16:21.230] - Taylor
Which is also why it's important to check regularly, because if you have something happen, something updates and something then breaks and then you don't check it, and then another backup happens and that overwrites the old one, because obviously save on space. You then don't have your working version. You've only got the version that doesn't work.

[00:16:43.370] - Gordon
Yeah. So again, very important to check your site regularly so that again, you can find out when there's an issue as quickly as possible. It's always a horrible thing to have a customer or a visitor to your website, ring you up and say, "did you know there was a problem with your website?" And you didn't know and people have been seeing this for days, weeks, months, however long it is. It's just a horrible feeling. Don't be that person that gets that call because that's horrible. So if the people you host with offer a maintenance or update plan, seriously consider it okay, because I recommend any person who has a website. It's an investment after all.

[00:17:28.310] - Taylor
It's like insurance.

[00:17:29.990] - Gordon
It is like insurance, but it's also an active insurance that actively tries to protect you, rather than just sitting there in case you need it. That's what a backup is really isn't it? Backup would be insurance. If you don't have a host that offers maintenance and updates, then both of our companies do. And you don't have to host with us for us to be able to do updates, maintenance and backups. So get in contact with Drayson Design or The Creative Tinker, and we can do that for you and just add it on to your services so that we are handling that side of it. We don't really do many promotions of our services on this vidcast and podcast, but every now and then we might, and that's one of the things we both offer, and it's quite a lot of work, actually. Because we have to go in once a day and see if there's any updates, do the updates and just make sure everything's working basically. We always recommend that you continue to monitor your site and make sure it's working just in case we miss something. But at least your security updates and your plug-in updates are being done. So you don't have to worry about that. So yeah, do get in touch with Drayson Design or The Creative Tinker if you have a website and you don't have maintenance, backups and updates because they are really important.

[00:19:02.630] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:19:03.410] - Gordon
Anything else you want to add?

[00:19:04.610] - Taylor
No, I think that's everything.

[00:19:06.230] - Gordon
Okay. So that's it for this week. Thank you for joining us. As always, you can join us on Facebook and on YouTube: like, share and subscribe.

[00:19:17.030] - Taylor
You can also go to our website: thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes and search for any topics that we may have spoken about.

[00:19:24.110] - Gordon
So until next week, we go live on Friday at 1pm. Until then, have a great week, have a great weekend, and we'll see you next week. My name's Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:19:38.090] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:19:40.610] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:19:41.210] - Taylor
Bye.

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Show Notes