[00:00:09.130] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.520] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:10.070] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:11.910] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.900] - 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 over the last seven days. And welcome back. We said we'd be back today, didn't we?

[00:00:26.510] - Taylor
Last episode before the new season.

[00:00:30.010] - Gordon
Yeah. So this is the end of 2022, and it's been quite an eventful year for both of us. We've managed to do quite a few things. We've had a few issues, we've had a few setbacks, we've had lots to overcome. But we thought we would spend this episode just going over our year like a review show, if you like.

[00:00:52.740] - Taylor
Yeah. So starting off, we had 647 minutes of content, which is about 10 hours and 47 minutes.

[00:01:03.040] - Gordon
Which is quite a lot, really.

[00:01:04.400] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:01:05.140] - Gordon
So that's about an average of 21 minutes an episode, right?

[00:01:08.390] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:01:08.900] - Gordon
Okay. So some of them were shorter, like last week's, for example, and some were a lot longer. It depends if we had lots to say about a particular subject or not, but we didn't manage... So 31 episodes out of a potential 52. There are several reasons why that count is actually quite low. We obviously try and get to you every week, but it's not always possible because one of the things that we had to deal with this year was you being ill. And this, we sort of knew is something that can disrupt our schedule, and your schedule in particular. And it's something that we had a few times during the year where there were issues, weren't there?

[00:01:57.030] - Taylor
We also had trips.

[00:01:59.120] - Gordon
We also had trips away. Yes, we did. So we were in America for me and for you, at different times.

[00:02:08.910] - Taylor
I was there twice.

[00:02:09.890] - Gordon
You were there twice. I was there twice. Yeah. Although, I think I knew, were we there together at one of them? No, we weren't. We didn't. Oh, someone at the front door. So, yes, we went to America twice each.

[00:02:25.680] - Taylor
I went to Porto.

[00:02:26.810] - Gordon
You also went to WordCamp.

[00:02:28.490] - Taylor
Yeah, I went to WordCamp, which was in Portugal this year. That was back in June. That was good fun.

[00:02:33.940] - Gordon
Yeah. So that's four trips between the two of us.

[00:02:37.410] - Taylor
Five trips.

[00:02:38.220] - Gordon
Five trips between the two of us. So, that's probably about ten episodes we missed there because of being away. Yeah. About right, isn't it? Ten episodes, two weeks ish on each trip. Yeah. So ten episodes. So we're down to 40 episodes. The other ten ish were due to your...

[00:03:02.760] - Taylor
Or just we just didn't have time. We were very busy sometimes as well.

[00:03:04.480] - Gordon
In fact, it's not 31 episodes. It will be 32 episodes, including this one.

[00:03:10.140] - Taylor
Yes.

[00:03:10.880] - Gordon
Because this is still in 2022. So 32 episodes. So there's only 20 we missed. Yeah. And yeah, sometimes it just wasn't possible due to workload as well. There were lots of reasons, but we're going to try and do better in 2023. We're going to try and get more episodes in. One of the things that we are considering doing, in fact, is having some statistics on our new website, so maybe you'll be able to see how many episodes were in each season and how long the content was in total. So we can sort of compare between the years that we've been doing this, which I think will be quite a good idea, don't you?

[00:03:49.130] - Taylor
Yeah, I agree. I love data and I like charts and things like that, so..

[00:03:54.430] - Gordon
It's good to analyse these things.

[00:03:55.660] - Taylor
Always interesting to me. So the major things that have happened this year, obviously we've spoken about me being ill and things like that. Generate Press, so I kind of made the switch to Gutenberg kind of this year.

[00:04:10.830] - Gordon
So just for those who didn't get that information originally, you were on Oxygen, which is a builder, and you were doing all of your websites in that, and then you decided to change to Generate Press. Why did you change?

[00:04:25.750] - Taylor
It was a bit just the way that the team behind Oxygen had handled things, the pace of development and new updates and things like that. It has improved a lot over the last kind of couple of months, but at the time it was very stagnant and a lot of things people wanted, they were not being heard or listened to, or just even responded back to. And I wanted a solution that I could easily build sites with, clients can easily build sites with. So one thing that, although Oxygen is very powerful, from a client's perspective, it's not easy to update unless you create lots of meta boxes, which in turn can restrict you further down the line. If you want to change the design or even just add something slight, just like a text or an image, you can't do that unless it's obviously built into the way the system is built. And also just Gutenberg is the future of WordPress. Sorry. And it's not going anywhere. So it's something that I thought is good to invest in and I'm really enjoying it. And I don't really miss it because with the custom blocks from Block Studio, I'm able to build all of the custom stuff that I wanted or I was doing previously, very easily.

[00:05:52.890] - Gordon
Very good. So you've moved to Generate Press and that required you to then migrate your personal website because that's what happens when you get a new builder.

[00:06:02.830] - Taylor
Yeah, I think the biggest thing for me was the way that Generate Press is set up and the templating system and engine that they have, really lended itself to the type of site that my personal site is. So taylordrayson.com, the way that is set up and the way that I have different cards for each different post type, for example, works really well with the Generate Press system and ecosystem. Whereas with Oxygen it was quite difficult. I was pretty much having to write custom code and not being able to use the nice visual builder, and it was tricky to be able to make sure that I can continue using that one card throughout the entire site in different places. Otherwise I keep having to copy and paste between different sections. If I made a change to one of the cards, I'd have to go and update that in all the other places that its been used. Whereas this way, kind of if I make it in one place, the entire site gets updated with that, which is really nice.

[00:07:11.290] - Gordon
Which makes life a lot easier to manage it.

[00:07:12.810] - Taylor
Yeah. And I'm up to 40 custom blocks on my personal website. So I've obviously got lots of custom code in there and it was very easy to kind of migrate because I had a lot of custom code in there already and it just made it easy because I can now reuse them in different places. So if I want to pull in one of my current data; so my battery percentage or something on a completely different page, I just drop the block in and it will automatically load and it just works.

[00:07:48.420] - Gordon
Which is great, makes life a lot easier. You're repurposing the content without having to rebuild all the coding to do so.

[00:07:55.960] - Taylor
Yeah, so I basically have written the code once and I can use that code in multiple different places.

[00:08:01.680] - Gordon
And multiple sites, I would guess, as well.

[00:08:03.100] - Taylor
Yeah, if I wanted to, yeah.

[00:08:05.210] - Gordon
So that's really good. So your website has actually taken on a big change this year, your personal website, you've got more data coming in, you're managing it in a different way, you're displaying it in different ways. And all the time you're sort of learning Generate Press. So you're learning the new system with your own project rather than on a client's project.

[00:08:30.950] - Taylor
Yeah, and there's a lot of things that again, stuff that I've done on my personal site I probably will never need to use in a client site because it's very specific to my needs. But there are some nice things that I've come across that I've needed for my personal site and thought that's quite a nice way to do it. So, for example, one of them is if you have a header at the top of each page, underneath the menu, on each page, being able to selectively disable that, or if you've got a newsletter just above your footer, for example, being able to selectively disable that on a per page basis can be very useful. There are ways to do it, there are location settings on the kind of newsletter block and you can say, "I want to display on the entire site except this page." However, it can be a bit finickety because when you're building a new page, you have to go back to that block and say, "I want to disable on this one," and you could get a very long list of lots of pages you don't want it to load on. So being able to selectively just do it on the page itself is a really useful tool and way to manage these conditional kind of blocks and things.

[00:09:53.090] - Gordon
Very good. So, just moving on, we had some new technology that we became available to us this year. So we got new phones, which has better speed. For me, a better camera, I mean, a much better camera system. That was one of the reasons I bought my new phone. We also had an update to watches. I upgraded my watch. I think you upgraded your watch as well.

[00:10:26.470] - Taylor
Not out of choice. I smashed my watch, or it fell on the floor and cracked. So not out of choice. I would probably still be with my one. But I've got a new watch, which you know. And I also got a new watch strap, so I've got a nice bright orange strap that I bought.

[00:10:43.640] - Gordon
So hopefully you'll see it and won't knock it onto the floor this time.

[00:10:48.510] - Taylor
Very true, yeah. I bought a new MacBook in America.

[00:10:50.970] - Gordon
You did. And that's got a bigger screen and it's again much faster. It's the next generation of the Apple silicon, so it's again investing in your business as well.

[00:11:03.700] - Taylor
So a new laptop for me meant...

[00:11:06.870] - Gordon
That I had a laptop, yes. That I got sold from my son, his previous laptop. So a laptop is not something that I've had before. That's not true. I have had a laptop, but I didn't use it.

[00:11:19.520] - Taylor
I remember...

[00:11:20.190] - Gordon
I had an iBook, little white one.

[00:11:22.440] - Taylor
Yeah. I used that at one point.

[00:11:23.950] - Gordon
You did.

[00:11:24.320] - Taylor
As well. But I remember when I started high school, you've always been like an iMac person who says, "you should always get an iMac, get an iMac."

[00:11:34.260] - Gordon
Yep.

[00:11:34.260] - Taylor
And you're like, "you wouldn't use a MacBook." And then I bought a MacBook because I kind of got to the point where I was going to college and I needed to be able to take, I needed a computer...

[00:11:45.390] - Gordon
Your work with you.

[00:11:46.240] - Taylor
With me. And so it obviously made sense for me. And you've always kind of thought, "I don't think I would ever need a laptop, it wouldn't be useful."

[00:11:53.900] - Gordon
And in fact, I've taken it on my trips with me and used it while I've been away, which has been very helpful and very useful. We've also been working on projects together, in particular the This Week With rebuild, the website rebuild, which is coming out next week. We are hopefully on target for that. There's a few things we still need to do, but it's looking really smart. We'll talk all about that in our next episode.

[00:12:21.210] - Taylor
But yeah, because we both have our own setups, it's kind of I'd be like, "hey, come and sit in my bedroom and I can sit at my desk and you can use your laptop" and obviously you're the same. So we kind of, you know, negotiate and sit in the lounge and both have our laptops and neither of us get our set ups.

[00:12:39.480] - Gordon
Yeah. And it's actually quite good. It's nice to be able to have a new environment that's a bit clearer, and be able to move around to a different place. And who knows? Who knows, in the summer when it's nice, I might, I might even go outside...

[00:12:56.950] - Taylor
Maybe.

[00:12:56.950] - Gordon
And work.

[00:12:58.630] - Taylor
But also in bed sometimes.

[00:13:00.500] - Gordon
Who knows? Yeah.

[00:13:02.090] - Taylor
You can have it up in your room.

[00:13:03.260] - Gordon
Yeah. So, yeah, if I was not feeling particularly well for a day, I could sit there with the computer, which allows me to do more than a laptop... Sorry, an iPad would have been able to do.

[00:13:15.570] - Taylor
Moving on to that, I got a new iPad.

[00:13:17.570] - Gordon
New iPad, yes.

[00:13:18.580] - Taylor
Did you get one?

[00:13:19.630] - Gordon
Did I get? No, no, not this year. But your iPad is something, you've had an iPad on and off. In fact, you had one 10 years ago for Christmas, because a picture came up on our feed showing that you had an iPad ten years ago.

[00:13:35.250] - Taylor
I have my old iPad upstairs still.

[00:13:37.120] - Gordon
Still got it?

[00:13:37.980] - Taylor
Yeah. I mean, the reason I got the new iPad was the new, you know, the A14 chip and things like that, and the speed of it. My iPad wasn't keeping its charge, it just, you know, you would charge it up and it would it would drain without even doing anything. And obviously the new cameras and the new buttons and things like that.

[00:14:03.150] - Gordon
But also being able to test websites on it, because having a website show on a tablet is more important these days than potentially having it show on a desktop. A tablet and phones are definitely the way people are using the web.

[00:14:21.640] - Taylor
It's interesting because the tablet actually shows you in landscape mode, the desktop screen.

[00:14:27.830] - Gordon
But it's a smaller screen, so therefore you need to make sure it's still viewable and readable and...

[00:14:33.090] - Taylor
Exactly.

[00:14:33.750] - Gordon
So forth. Plus it's a touch screen, which is a different way to interact with the website. So that's a good thing. Having an up to date tablet is always good.

[00:14:42.170] - Taylor
I got a VR headset for my birthday.

[00:14:44.980] - Gordon
You did.

[00:14:45.640] - Taylor
Called the Metaquest 2.

[00:14:47.450] - Gordon
Yes, and I had one of those previously, and that's been, I was going to say an eye opener! But a VR headset is actually, I think, a very interesting use of technology. It transports you into a new world without taking you outside of your house. And I've used it a lot more than I thought I was going to. And I use it for social and relaxing. So I play games with friends, basically, and it's a live interactive experience where you can hear the person, you can talk to them, you can play the game in this environment together. And it's a really nice way just to take yourself out of any situation you've been in, and actually relax. Because I know that if I didn't have something like that, I would just end up working all the time. And that's not good for anyone. You've got to have downtime where you can actually do something different and something that you enjoy doing. And spending time with friends, playing games is a good way of doing that.

[00:16:03.430] - Taylor
Yeah. So, moving on, I launched Snippet Club, finally.

[00:16:08.650] - Gordon
You did.

[00:16:09.110] - Taylor
Which was one of my, my membership site for web developers and designers to improve their skills and be able to build more dynamic websites with a bit of custom code, rather than having to rely on a plug-in all the time.

[00:16:26.250] - Gordon
So that was good because you did a launch for that with a lifetime deal. And so you have subscribers now, which is great, and you're creating content for it, which is even better. And you're putting content up from your own experiences. So you're finding ways to solve a problem with your websites, or your customers' websites. And then you're turning those into a tutorial that you can then put on your Snippet Club so that other people can benefit and learn from it. And one of the things that you did recently was the map for The Admin Bar, which was a very good solution, but it was also a really good tutorial as well. And lots of people have benefited from that, myself included.

[00:17:13.990] - Taylor
And the original code actually came from my personal website, which I had done probably three days before I built The Admin Bar community map. And it was like the perfect timing. I saw it and I thought, "I've just done this. I've got most of the code"

[00:17:31.460] - Gordon
It should be easy to do, yeah.

[00:17:32.470] - Taylor
It's just a matter of modifying it to fit the needs, and requirements.

[00:17:36.610] - Gordon
And then just looking at something that's been very big and made a lot of changes in the world really, over this last six months even, not even the year, is how AI has progressed. So we had AI text writing; so allowing a computer to create a blog post for you, or a description for a service, or, you know, some text for your website. That's something that sort of started near the beginning of the year. And then since then, we've got AI images; so text to image, which is huge at the moment. I mean, there are so many people who are finding apps that are using this technology to create sort of dream booth type images where you submit photos of yourself and it then creates fantasy images that look like you. There's lots of those on iPhones and things now which are just exploding because everyone is excited to be able to do that sort of thing. And then you've got things like MidJourney, which is a text to image service, which is quite reasonable. And I've been playing with it a lot, and I can see uses for it in graphic design and creating elements of imagery that I myself can't create because I'm not an artist, I'm a graphic designer. I will place things, I will make it look good; but I can't draw a pig wearing a tutu, should I ever need one. However, AI can. So I now have a way to do that. And then just recently, last couple of months or so, we've got Chat GPT, which is the sort of really smart chat bot where you can basically ask it to... Not just questions, like you would do if you were searching for information on Google, but you could ask it to do something creative, like write you a poem or a song or code. Yeah, exactly. You today used it to create some code or modify some code that you already had.

[00:19:50.140] - Taylor
Explaining code, what it does. RegEx's, which are sometimes...

[00:19:56.270] - Gordon
A nightmare.

[00:19:57.510] - Taylor
Unless you know RegEx, it can sometimes seem confusing and how you can extract it. And I used it on the new This Week With website, where we have a function that duplicates a post and it normally just takes the title and adds the word 'copy' to it. And I asked Chat GPT and said, "can you extract the episode number from a title that said, 'This Week With Taylor and Gordon S3 E109,' and can you add one to the episode?" And it extracted it even just with the word E, and it knew that meant episode, which was, you know, very, very clever. And it then used RegEx to obviously extract that number and then yeah, then it added one to it, so.

[00:20:48.260] - Gordon
Yeah. It's very exciting. And this is just the beginning. As models get more complicated and get more data in it, then the output is going to be hugely...

[00:20:59.900] - Taylor
Closer to what you want.

[00:21:01.030] - Gordon
Yeah, exactly. So I can just see it exploding even more in 2023. I think AI is going to be the big thing for 2023.

[00:21:13.210] - Taylor
Cool.

[00:21:13.850] - Gordon
So that's sort of our year in review. Is there anything else you can think of you want to say?

[00:21:20.160] - Taylor
I don't think so. I think obviously the stats are nice and obviously looking back we've done quite a lot, and sometimes that's something you don't realise is that you've done more than you think.

[00:21:32.750] - Gordon
Yeah, and it's nice to look back, actually. And just I was looking at our past episodes and just looking at the sort of main topics and going, "oh yeah, I remember talking about that. Oh, yeah, I should look at that again, because things have changed," and it's just interesting to sort of do a review in that sort of way. And it could be good for you as a business as well. Do a review of your business. How have you changed in the last year? What has been good? What has been bad? What could you improve looking forward? Because the next week or so, next few days, in fact, we've got New Year's resolutions that people make and break pretty often shortly afterwards.

[00:22:15.410] - Taylor
I mean, something that I want to do is obviously my website, my personal website, has grown so much. Every, at least probably once a week, I'm adding some sort of new functionality to it just because it's fun, it keeps my brain thinking about what I can do to make stuff dynamic, what I can do to display data in different ways. So just yesterday, I built a photo gallery, and what I wanted to do is only get the photos from activities and check-ins that actually had, I had uploaded a photo of something, and not just displaying all of the check-in maps and pins, because that's not very interesting. And I had to write a SQL database command or query to be able to extract that data. And just thinking back to when my website first started, obviously I didn't have all of these ideas, didn't have all of these little things that... You could spend probably hours on my website and keep discovering new stuff, new things that I've built. And something that I want to work on is a stats page, or like a kind of stats dashboard, and also a year in review. So for the 2022, 2021, it'll be the same page, but the data will just come from that year. And it'll be nice to be able to look back halfway through the year, even at the end of the year or previous years, and see, okay, what were my top check-in categories? So for 2022, it's Gym/fitness Centre, because that's David Lloyds and I go there quite a lot. But seeing how that changes through the years and see the average sleep that I have gotten, and how that has, again, compare that to the previous years. And so I think that might be something quite interesting. And again, I can reuse, I can create a block that says the average sleep and I can make it dynamic so that if it puts it onto a yearly archive page, then it only queries for that year. Whereas if I put it onto the stats dashboard, it does the entire site and does across every single year. And that means I only have to build one block, updating it in one place if I ever need to, and it keeps everything tidy.

[00:24:43.870] - Gordon
It's very good. So that's our year and that's the end of this episode.

[00:24:51.550] - Taylor
And end of 2022.

[00:24:52.600] - Gordon
And the end of 22. It's the end of lots of things, which means there's lots of beginnings and new starts coming. So, yes, we will be back next week, and next week's episode will be a special episode about our new revamped This Week With website.

[00:25:11.000] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:25:11.460] - Gordon
So have we completely redone it. We've taken some existing ideas that we already have on the site and move them across and then we've rethought out a lot of other things as well.

[00:25:25.500] - Taylor
And again, we've gained a lot of experience. Same with the first website to the second, and the second to now the third website.

[00:25:32.780] - Gordon
In fact, what we should do is we should have a sort of a history type page that we can take some screenshots of the existing sites, just to show the differences over the years.

[00:25:44.290] - Taylor
But, yeah, we've gained, obviously, experience, and the way that we've presented is slightly changed over the period of time, and what becomes important, we now understand. And so we can obviously build that in and make sure that it's useful for people.

[00:26:01.250] - Gordon
But we're not going to talk about it now, because that is next week's episode. So thank you for joining us. As always, you can like, share and subscribe. We are on Facebook and on YouTube.

[00:26:14.870] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk, to find all our past episodes and anything we may have spoken about. And you can also see all of the different podcasting channels that we are on as well. So if you prefer to listen while you're in the car or wherever, you can use it on your favourite podcast app, and there's a whole list of different podcast apps that we're on.

[00:26:37.230] - Gordon
That's right. So we'll be back next week, Friday at 1p.m. With our brand new season. Season four.

[00:26:46.120] - Taylor
With our new colour.

[00:26:47.880] - Gordon
With our new colour for the episodes with a brand new start, and we'll talk all about that then. We'd like to thank everyone who watches our episodes or listens to our episodes. We thank you so much for, you know, spending time with us. We enjoy doing these for ourselves and it's nice to know that other people are getting something out of it as well. So, with an episode which is about six minutes over the average.

[00:27:18.000] - Taylor
Which takes us to 56 minutes. 10 hours and, no, 11 hours and six minutes ish.

[00:27:25.490] - Gordon
Wow. For the year. Look at the stats page on the new website, it'll show you there. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next week. My name is Gordon, I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:27:34.530] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:27:37.050] - Gordon
Happy New Year. Goodbye.

[00:27:39.240] - Taylor
Bye.

This Week's Topics

Show Notes