[00:00:07.620] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:08.076] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:08.940] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:11.580] - Taylor
I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.770] - 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.

[00:00:23.840] - Taylor
Welcome back.

[00:00:24.700] - Gordon
Thank you very much for joining us. It's been another busy week. Any news, first of all? [sneezes] Pardon me.

[00:00:35.370] - Taylor
No, none from me.

[00:00:36.870] - Gordon
Weather's turning colder, isn't it? That's what I'm going to blame my sneezing on there. Right, do you want to go first or shall I?

[00:00:45.380] - Taylor
I want to go first.

[00:00:46.140] - Gordon
Go on then you go. Let's go for your topic of the week.

[00:00:49.150] - Taylor
This week I have been creating my child theme for my 2024 theme. So something that I've started doing is creating a new theme each year, updating it, starting fresh, updating it with new things that I've found, and also getting rid of stuff that, kind of the old way.

[00:01:13.280] - Gordon
I think we should explain what a child theme is, first of all.

[00:01:17.010] - Taylor
So this is a starter site that I use on my sites to give me a base point to start from, essentially. So it has a lot of colours set up, typography, spacings, and just default styling to something that I'm happy with. And that helps me also set up all the plug-ins and all of the settings for the site so that the stuff that is repeated and I have to do on every single site when I start a new site, I don't have to do and it's all done for me. Adding basic templates, so things like 404 pages, search results, archive pages, things like that, that just will need to be done and it just gives me a place to start from, so I'm not starting from scratch every single time.

[00:02:05.560] - Gordon
So the idea is to save you time in the long run. Although, setting something like this up takes quite a while doesn't it?

[00:02:13.650] - Taylor
Yeah, so it saves you time in the long run, but also keeps you consistent in the long run. So setting up things like typography sizes and spacing sizes and border radiuses, all of these things that you can then reuse throughout the site and you're not adding these random values per page and stuff and you end up with an incoherent site, really. And so it allows you to keep consistency. And if you want to copy sections between sites, for example, because you're using the exact same formatting, exact same styles and things like that, all of the styles will pull in based on the current site. So, for example, we can set a heading font size and a spacing font size, but we can change the actual values that they reference on each site. But if you copy blocks between your sites, then it basically picks up the styles that have been set. So if I change the colour, the primary colour for a site and copy it to a new site, it will inherit the primary colour from the new site because it references a variable, which we can then make sure that keeps consistency.

[00:03:27.950] - Gordon
So if you're creating a new one every year, how does it work if you go over the year and you go from one template to another? Do you have backwards compatibility as far as you can?

[00:03:39.620] - Taylor
So I wouldn't update existing themes or existing sites. It's just near the end of each year I create a new theme with new things I've learnt, new things I've found, better ways to do certain things. And so you restart, you pull in stuff that you know you're going to keep. But then you look through and go, "Do I need this? Do I need this plug-in? Yes or no? Do I need these styles? Do I need these settings?" And you can start from fresh. Because one thing that you do find is the longer a site is online for, the messier it becomes, because things get added on, attached to, and things like that. So throughout the year, I'll be updating my new starter site, but obviously then I'm not taking into consideration how that affects the rest of the starter site, and I end up having lots of redundant code in there that is overlapping and things like that.

[00:04:41.590] - Gordon
Okay. Very interesting.

[00:04:43.550] - Taylor
So yeah, that's something that I've been working on it. I've spent about nine hours or so in total building out my starter site, which is really nice because it's easy to clone. You don't have to start from scratch, which can be quite daunting to remember everything that needs to be set up and configured when you first set up a new site.

[00:05:05.640] - Gordon
Yeah. That's very good. So I think what we're trying to suggest to our listeners and viewers is that if you've got some sort of base system that you need to set up for anything, whether it be a website or some sort of software that you use, then even if it might take a little bit of time to do, it's worth doing because in the long run, it will save you time and it will make your workflow so much quicker and easier, right?

[00:05:32.440] - Taylor
Yeah, exactly. It's the same as if you have repeating tasks, if you can automate that you make less mistakes, you don't have to remember as much, and you make sure that you get the same process every single time. That's one of the nice things I like about coding and programming is that I know that I will get pretty much the exact same output and result every single time because all it's doing is following my instructions.

[00:05:57.150] - Gordon
Very good. Anything else you want to say about that?

[00:05:59.820] - Taylor
I don't think so. It's a nice thing to get done.

[00:06:03.230] - Gordon
Okay. I've just thought of a little bit of news. Both of us have updated to the next OS for Mac, 'Sonoma,' and it's only been a few days now, so I am still testing it, finding issues or not, finding out which software is working, which isn't. So I think we should talk about that a little bit in the future once we've got a little bit more experience with it, and we can come back and tell everyone what we think is really good about it, what we think is really bad about it. So we'll do that for the future. My topic for today is that at the weekend just gone, I was hosting and comparing at our local community day. Now, this is, I think, the fifth time I've done it. I want to say fifth. I'm not sure if it's five or not, but it's something like that, four or five times. And I took over the entertainment a few years ago. So I organise all of the acts that are going to be there for entertaining. I work out what time they're going to be on, how long they get. We've got a professional sound man who comes along, a guy called Ed. He's very, very good. He's done it for many years now, so he knows what's expected. He brings everything he needs with him. We used to have a stage, but we don't have the stage anymore. We've got just a marquis with space in front of it, like a small arena, if you like. The acts were everything from singers and bands through to... We had a dance school, we had some choirs, like groups of people. We had myself doing magic. We had a couple of issues during the day with people who were unable to make it because of illness. But luckily, being a magician, filling in 20 minutes is really not difficult because I can just grab my box and we'll do a short magic show just to fill in that time. We also had about 52 different stalls in the event, and that was good. People could go around and buy fudge. My pantomime people were there, so they were giving out flyers. First people to ever see the flyers, in fact, because I handed them over at that time, so they got to see them for the first time. The reason I'm mentioning all this is because one of the things I wanted to do and I had thought about in the past is to create a digital version of the schedule so that people could look up what was coming and then make sure that they stay for a particular band that was coming up or a group or whatever. There was a printed list, but the printed list was out of date as soon as it was printed because we had someone pull out. And so I was originally thinking of making a PDF file, just a long, thin PDF file that would work well on a mobile, just to allow people to swipe through it, see what's on, and the time it was on, and make sure they were there for it. That was my initial thought. And then last week, or during the last week, we came up with an idea, didn't we?

[00:09:33.490] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:09:35.570] - Gordon
So there's a bit of software, a SaaS, Software as a Service called 'Frontly.' I'll put a link in the show notes. And we bought a lifetime deal to this. We each bought one, in fact. And what it does is it allows us to put a front-end or a website end onto a Google spreadsheet. So let me just go through this. All the data is coming from the spreadsheet, and it's acting a little bit like a data source or a database, if you like. And it's taking the data and it's creating a front-end based on what you've asked it to do and sort of drag and drop components so that you can display the data in a way you want it to be displayed. But you can do a lot more than that. You can interact with it. So you can have data that will create a link that will go through to something else. You can have data where you can have a little box and you can click on it and you can get further information. What else were we doing? There's something else.

[00:10:44.310] - Taylor
You can edit records.

[00:10:44.920] - Gordon
You can edit records yeah, for the frontend and add a new one.

[00:10:48.540] - Taylor
You can display them in different formats. So, for example, a table, or a grid, a calendar. So one of the examples on their website, on the demos, was a dog walker. And so you can do relational data between different sheets. So you have a sheet of all the dogs that you walk, and then you obviously have a status of active or no longer walking. And then you can have a walk sheet.

[00:11:15.700] - Gordon
No longer with the walker, as opposed to the dog no longer walking.

[00:11:20.280] - Taylor
Well, you're no longer walking the dog, yeah. And then you can have a walking log where you can then select one of the dogs from your list, select the date and then the location, and it will then put that onto a calendar and then also a map so you can see where you are on certain days.

[00:11:40.010] - Gordon
A calendar view, we should say. Like a view that is laid out like a calendar. The other thing that it did, which is what I was trying to remember, was it allows you to create a solution from Frontly using AI. So you can basically type in what you're looking for this web app to be able to do. It will then create a spreadsheet for you and the frontend in Frontly and give you a starting point. It's very rare that you're going to get something finished in that sort of situation, but it gives you a really good jumping-off point to get going because it helps to build the structure of the data and shows how it's going to look inside the Frontly. And you get a web app address for this, so just a normal web address that you can send people to, and you can have password-protected areas, so only admins can get to it, if you want to protect the changing of data, for example. And of course, because it's pulling the data in from the spreadsheet, you can also go to the Google Sheet, just change the data in there, and it will automatically be reflected in the web app. So that's what I did. That's what we did, I should say. We created a web app for the Community Day, and it basically had a list of all the different acts, the time they were starting, what time they were finishing. And we had an 'up next' button. So every time the act had finished and we were going on to the next one, I could just go into the web app and I could click on a button and say 'completed,' and it would then take that off the list so that 'up next' was showing the next item in the list and the ones that had already been passed had been taken off the list. So it was an up to date schedule and it proved to be really useful because there was a last minute change on the day as well. We had another act that was unable to make it due to illness. And so I could put in there that they were no longer going to be available. And so as a last minute change, we're going to have a slightly longer magic show. Which is what I did. And that worked really well. There's a few little things in there that I think I might have changed if I'd had a bit more time. But we basically started work on this on Thursday of last week, and the event was on Saturday. We didn't mention it last week because we didn't know how it was going to go. We thought we'd wait until this week and tell you all about it now. But yeah, I really like it and it's got lots of possibilities, hasn't it?

[00:14:25.690] - Taylor
Yeah, I think that it can be really useful. It's an easy way to get proof of concepts together and stuff that you don't want to build a full-on app and connect all your back-end and databases and things like that and building out a proper frontend. It can be really nice and an easy way to manage that.

[00:14:44.340] - Gordon
And it's a great way to have data collection that's friendly. Google Sheets can look quite intimidating if you don't understand spreadsheets. And handing over a Google spreadsheet to a customer and saying, "Don't touch this, don't touch that. Just make sure you only put data in this area and don't change any of the formulas anywhere else." Well, that's just not going to happen, is it?

[00:15:07.960] - Taylor
No.

[00:15:08.410] - Gordon
It's going to be impossible. But if you can build a web app based on that data and allow the customer to put new records in and have a really nice interface for them to be able to interact with their own data, then that's going to be great. And that's pretty much what I purchased it for. I think that's the same as you, isn't it?

[00:15:32.070] - Taylor
Yeah, same for me.

[00:15:33.120] - Gordon
Yeah. So we've only had it for a week or so. We've only built a couple of apps with it. But so far, it's looking really good, and I'm really pleased with it. Anything else you want to say on that?

[00:15:45.830] - Taylor
I don't think so. I think it's a really nice tool for both people that don't know how to code and people that do know how to code but don't want to invest a lot of time to get a prototype together or just get something that's essentially just a Google Sheet that you just basically giving it a nicer user experience to just update things, really.

[00:16:04.900] - Gordon
Yeah. So we might come back to that in the future and tell you a little bit about other things that we've done with it. Maybe there'll be something we can show you in the future, that's something for another episode. So that's everything I want to say.

[00:16:20.980] - Taylor
That's everything from me as well.

[00:16:22.610] - Gordon
Thank you very much for joining us. As always, you can like, share, and subscribe. We're on Facebook and on YouTube.

[00:16:29.710] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.

[00:16:35.000] - Gordon
Please make sure you let anyone know about our podcast if you think they'll be interested in what we talk about. We realise that some of what we talk about is quite technical, but we do try and make it understandable for people who maybe aren't so technical. For those who are, it gives you a little bit more information. If there is anything you don't understand, it's a bit technical, don't feel frightened of it. Don't feel like it's going to be too difficult for you. Just send us a message. We'd like to hear from you.

[00:17:06.180] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:17:06.710] - Gordon
Leave us a comment in either Facebook or on YouTube, and we'll come back to you. Until next week, we'll be with you at 1pm next Friday. My name is Gordon, and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:17:21.930] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:17:23.790] - Gordon
And just before we say goodbye, I've just realised we are away for some of next week. We will attempt to make sure we get an episode out to you. We may even be away when we do it. Yeah, maybe we'll do that. Anyway, that's it from us. We'll see you next week. Goodbye.

[00:17:42.270] - Taylor
Bye.

This Week's Topics

Show Notes