[00:00:08.860] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.200] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:09.370] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:11.400] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.760] - Gordon
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 had quite an exciting week, didn't we, Taylor?

[00:00:29.510] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:00:30.050] - Gordon
So on Tuesday, we had a photoshoot. Now, one of the things I've said, and I think we mentioned last week, is that I always like to have up-to-date photos. And up to date being within the last five years, because I think you change quite a bit over five years. Not so much when you get to my age, but a little bit older than me and also Taylor's sort of age, there's an awful lot of changes within five years, so I think it's really important to have photos that actually look like you. And we don't actually have the photos back yet.

[00:01:06.610] - Taylor
No.

[00:01:06.930] - Gordon
But as soon as we do get them back, we may even update This Week With photos.

[00:01:12.410] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:01:12.900] - Gordon
Because they've been there for about three years now, since we started back in 2020. Taylor's changed. He's got a bit more hair around his face. And he's also got these huge muscle things that he's very proud to show off to everybody because he spends most of his life at the gym. Isn't that right?

[00:01:33.490] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:01:34.490] - Gordon
Yeah. So, yes, we will probably come back and mention this to you once we change the photos. So onto our topics for today, any news from you before we get to those?

[00:01:47.760] - Taylor
Not news.

[00:01:49.260] - Gordon
Okay, shall I go first today?

[00:01:52.260] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:01:53.590] - Gordon
Okay, so "ScanSnap" is something that I've mentioned before in the past. It is a Fujitsu, although it's just been taken over by Richoh, apparently. And it looks a bit like an old fax machine. If you are old enough to know what a fax machine looks like. It's got a little cover that lifts up and then it's got a feeder for paper and a slot that comes out the front. And what it does is it scans your documents for you. I've had one for quite a long time now. I've had an iX500, which is, I think, one of the first ones they came out with. And it's been working really, really well. We do all sorts of documents that are scanned in and are sent directly to Evernote, which is a cloud-based service so that I can basically store all my documents in the cloud without them taking up any hard drive space and being able to search for them whenever I need them. And one of the nice things is it creates searchable PDF files from all the documents. So you can put, for example, five or six sheets in and it will make one PDF document and it's scanning both sides, so it's double-sided. This has been something that's been really useful for quite a long time now. However, during the week, I decided I would upgrade. There's nothing wrong with the iX500. In fact, I will be looking in the loft to find the box for it and I will be selling it on, because there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. The new version I got is an iX1600, so iX1600, and that is the latest model they have. It's about 440 pounds, I think, I paid for it. And it's got lots of advantages. For a start, it's got a little touch screen in it now and it doesn't require you to link it to a computer to be able to scan, which is what the previous one needed. So you can actually just attach it to WiFi.

[00:04:07.540] - Taylor
Okay.

[00:04:07.740] - Gordon
Just sign into your WiFi and it will work directly. It's quicker. This is mad. It does 40 pages per minute, which if it's double-sided, is 80 sides per minute, which is a huge speed. It's a big speed increase. The other thing it does, because it now has a touch screen, is you can set up different locations, which you could do before on the computer, but it wasn't as easy to select. So you can set up different locations. So I can now set up applications. For example, I've got now an email one, I've got a Photoshop one. So if I want to scan something and I want it to go straight onto email, I just press the Email button, click 'Scan.' It will scan the document, open up a brand new email on my computer, put the document as an attachment. With Photoshop, it will scan the document, open Photoshop, create a new document, put the document in there so that I can work on it, which is great if I've got artwork from a customer, or I've got something that I need to send to someone, but I don't necessarily need to store it, which is all really useful. It also allows you to have different locations that you can send it. I normally send it to Evernote, but I can now send it to my downloads folder so that I can have a file that's scanned and sent directly to my computer that's not put on the cloud. And it also allows you to send it to your mobile phone or your tablet and you can have different users. So each different user can have their own settings. So you can have them send it to different places. Like, for example, you use Dropbox. And so you could, if you wanted to, set up a user so you could scan a document and it would just send the document straight to your Dropbox so that it's ready for you. Which, if you think about it, is really quite cool if you are, for example, not here, but there's an item of post that's come through and you're needing it quite urgently. Well, I can now scan it. If you set it up, I can scan it into your Dropbox so that it just comes straight to you wherever you are in the world.

[00:06:30.800] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:06:31.320] - Gordon
Which is really useful. If you're on one of your 12 months of coffee locations and a really important document arrives, I can send it to you. We hadn't thought of that before, but that's a really useful thing. So what I'm effectively trying to say is that ScanSnap is a tool for me, and it's something that allows me to take documents and make them usable very quickly and easily, whether that be to archive them or to bring them into an application to use. And the new version has given me a lot more freedom because it now allows me the WiFi and also being able to use it on my iPhone. And what it does, I should mention if you scan it with your iPhone, it will scan it and send it straight to your iPhone as a document. So that is my new purchase.

[00:07:25.460] - Taylor
Very nice.

[00:07:26.050] - Gordon
And it's really exciting. I really quite like it. So if you're interested in a ScanSnap, I will very soon have an iX500, which is perfectly good, ready for sale very soon. I'll let you know. You haven't used it yet, have you? I haven't, no. Is it something that you think would be of interest to you?

[00:07:49.490] - Taylor
Potentially. I don't scan stuff very often. I just don't have a need. Most of the stuff I do is digital. So I don't have a need for it at the moment, but I'm sure it's...

[00:08:02.000] - Gordon
As you get more post, I think you'll find it will become more useful because we scan pretty much all the post that comes in that's of any consequence. So we've got copies of it, whether that be a tax bill or a bank statement or whatever it is. In fact, I don't do bank statements because you can just download them, but you know.

[00:08:22.510] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:08:23.500] - Gordon
So that's my topic. Oh, the other thing is you'll notice I've had a haircut. I did that for my photoshoot. Yeah. Your turn.

[00:08:31.410] - Taylor
My topic for this week is a template solution. So earlier this week, well, last week, should I say, I was trying to find a way to create some sort of templating system that I could essentially select the template I wanted to load on the front end.

[00:08:56.740] - Gordon
But this is within WordPress, right? Okay.

[00:08:59.910] - Taylor
And so Generate Press has their GP Elements, which allow you to hook into places. You can set where you want it to load, where you want to exclude it. However, if you excluded it on a per-page basis, it would be very very tedious to update and change because you'd have to do with every single different element, for example. And so I asked a couple of friends that I have and said, "Do you have any good solutions for this?" And Kyle and another friend, Jake, they had both been using a custom taxonomy. And this sparked an idea for Kyle, who created a video earlier this week on this exact solution where you create a taxonomy. You can then tell the different elements and hooks and stuff to be excluded if it is in this post taxonomy.

[00:09:58.380] - Gordon
Do you want to explain what a taxonomy is for those who don't know?

[00:10:01.420] - Taylor
It's like a category or tag, just a way of basically categorising posts and things in the back end of the website. And it's not used anywhere on the front end. It's purely used to basically say "this is part of this category." And we can use it then to then exclude different sections. So your page header or your call to action in the footer or whatever, you can exclude them based on that category. So instead of having to put in each page, you can just add a category and then it will exclude all of the pages that have that category in it. So it's a lot easier and a lot cleaner.

[00:10:39.230] - Gordon
That sounds like a good solution.

[00:10:40.910] - Taylor
Yes. However, Kyle wanted to be able to hook into the content. So when you create your templates for your different pages, so say you have a blog post, you wanted to add something before or after the actual content body. Now, if you're using the default, Generate Press template, then you have the hooks that you can hook into the 'After Content' and 'Before Content' hooks.

[00:11:03.970] - Gordon
Okay.

[00:11:04.910] - Taylor
But when you're using the GP Elements solution where you create a content template, they don't have those hooks. And so I said to Kyle, "give me five minutes and I'll see if I can come up with something that will allow us to create our own hooks for the dynamic contents template." And that's what I did. And Kyle linked to it in his tutorial, and I added some code tracking, a hockey stack to my snippets.tdrayson website, which is where I can just put snippets that I can just throw away and doesn't matter about them. I linked them, linked to there. So it was interesting to see how many views I got and things like that just from the video itself.

[00:11:53.880] - Gordon
And so if people are finding this sort of thing would be useful to them, or they know somebody who can understand it and use it for them, is there a way for them to access this? Would the video be a good start?

[00:12:09.200] - Taylor
Yes. The video is a great place to go. The links is in the...

[00:12:16.480] - Gordon
Show notes?

[00:12:16.930] - Taylor
The description of the video, so they can go and find it in there. We can also link to it on our website as well, so you can go there directly. But yeah, it was just a nice thing to be able to do and a way that I use my snippet, my paste bin clone that I created, which works really well because I just basically wrote the code and then I was like, "Oh, I need to send this." And then I just created a quick link and sent it and it worked and everyone could see it.

[00:12:45.890] - Gordon
That's really good. So did you get many views?

[00:12:49.890] - Taylor
Yeah, I got quite a few. I need to keep obviously checking, but yeah, I got a good amount of views and people also checked out my Snippet Club website. So I got some views on that as well which is obviously always good.

[00:13:00.580] - Gordon
And this was earlier this week, wasn't it?

[00:13:01.820] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:13:02.180] - Gordon
Yeah, okay. These videos are really useful when you need that idea. So it could be that at the moment there's lots of people who aren't looking for that solution, but in the future, they'll need it, they'll find the video, and then you'll have this knock-on effect of people coming to your site, which is really good.

[00:13:23.350] - Taylor
Yeah. I mean, one of Kyle's most popular and most viewed videos is an Elemental video.

[00:13:29.520] - Gordon
Right.

[00:13:29.840] - Taylor
Which he doesn't use anymore, he doesn't use Elemental. But it was there because he built it. He created a video because he had trouble with it and he wanted to document a way to be able to... Yeah, he wanted to document a way to do it. And so then he posted it and it still gets lots of traction today.

[00:13:47.760] - Gordon
And that's quite a good idea as well. If you're doing a process and it's quite involved, do a screen capture and talk about what you're doing and then just put it on YouTube because you can put it as an unlisted video or a private video. And if you ever need to have someone else come and do this process, or in the future you've forgotten how to do it because you've not been working for eight months because of Covid, and all of a sudden you've come back to it and it's like, "Oh, I used to do this all the time and I've forgotten." You've got that video you can go and watch and you can build a little library of processes in your business that anyone can refer to as they need to.

[00:14:29.230] - Taylor
Yeah. And I also... Part of the reason why I started Snippet Club is I wanted to be able to look back and see the code that I had written, because I had lots and lots of code scattered about different places in local installs, etc, that was sometimes really good, but I just didn't do anything with it; I didn't need it at the time, and so I didn't do anything about it. And then trying to find that in the future is actually very, very difficult. So when I was creating actually the snippet for Kyle, I actually used one of my previous tutorials because I've written something similar to this that does what I need. So I'll just have a... Go and have a look, see what I did there, and then just copied the code.

[00:15:10.620] - Gordon
Yeah, really interesting. Very good. Maybe we'll come back to this and you can update us on any further developments with this idea, because I know we've already come up with something that we might do with my Gordon's Magic website. So maybe that will be something we talk about in the future.

[00:15:32.690] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:15:33.850] - Gordon
Well, that's everything from me.

[00:15:35.690] - Taylor
And that's everything from me as well.

[00:15:37.240] - Gordon
So thank you so much for joining us. As always, please like, share, and subscribe on YouTube and on Facebook.

[00:15:45.280] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes and anything we may have spoken about.

[00:15:51.980] - Gordon
And if you've got any comments about anything we've said, please leave them below if you're on Facebook or on YouTube. If you're viewing this on our website, you can actually go to YouTube just by clicking the YouTube button at the bottom of the video somewhere here. I'm not sure where it is. It's over here, I think. It's over there. And then you'll be able to see all the comments and add your own comments so that we can see what it is you have to say.

[00:16:18.420] - Taylor
Wonderful.

[00:16:19.240] - Gordon
Until next week, we'll be with you at 1:00pm on Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon, and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:16:27.200] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:16:29.760] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:16:59.880] - Taylor
Bye.

This Week's Topics

Show Notes