[00:00:00.530] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.270] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:10.350] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:12.030] - 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 to everybody who's joined us here. It's Friday, it's 1pm, and it's been a busy week.

[00:00:29.360] - Taylor
It has.

[00:00:29.970] - Gordon
So just quickly, do you want to mention where you've been, what you've been doing this week?

[00:00:34.870] - Taylor
So I was in Budapest from last Sunday through to Wednesday, and I was just travelling again, finishing my 12 Months of Coffee project. That was the 12th city that I visited across 11 countries, I think it was in the end, if you don't count Belfast, which is part of UK. But yeah, it was...

[00:01:00.010] - Gordon
It's part of Ireland. That's its own country.

[00:01:02.850] - Taylor
No. It's in the UK. It's in Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK.

[00:01:07.220] - Gordon
Ah! Of course it is.

[00:01:08.040] - Taylor
But anyway. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. I got to go to the thermal spas, which were really fascinating. It was like an outdoor hot spa, basically. It's like 37 degrees. I got to explore Budapest. It's very, very pretty. Walked along the river, walked up this big hill/ mountain, got to view the entire city, and I collected my Starbucks mug.

[00:01:33.810] - Gordon
Which is really important because his collection is pretty much outgrowing our kitchen now.

[00:01:40.000] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:01:40.500] - Gordon
Yeah. So, yeah, lovely trip then?

[00:01:42.910] - Taylor
It was.

[00:01:43.490] - Gordon
Really good. Okay. So that's the end of that project.

[00:01:47.770] - Taylor
It is.

[00:01:48.430] - Gordon
On to your next project. Is that going to be 12 months of coffee in America?

[00:01:53.030] - Taylor
Maybe. Who knows?

[00:01:55.590] - Gordon
That'll be quite a long way to go for three days each time. You might have to do 12 states of America, maybe.

[00:02:05.430] - Taylor
Something like that.

[00:02:05.970] - Gordon
Something like that, yeah. Anyway, let's get straight onto our topics. Do you want to go first or shall I?

[00:02:12.140] - Taylor
I'll go first this week.

[00:02:13.020] - Gordon
Okay.

[00:02:14.160] - Taylor
So my topic is planning for the future.

[00:02:20.020] - Gordon
For the future you.

[00:02:21.850] - Taylor
Yes. So I am redoing or creating version 2 of my starter site. Now, my starter site is something that I use on every single website build that I do, and it gives me a solid foundation for starting new projects. It has all of my colour styles, my spacing, just the general theme, styling that I set up, all of my plug-ins and things like that, so that it's ready to go, so I can start getting straight into building a site. And it takes quite a while to get the starter site set up initially, and also it's an ever-changing site. So I'm always adding to it, always updating it. And Generate Blocks brought out their new update, which includes classes. And so I've had to rework my entire starter site to use this new workflow, which has been good because it means I can re-evaluate the way that my starter site is set up, how variables and styles are configured and things like that. But it's a lot of work. Starting from scratch, you have to really think about how you're going to set it up so that you're not boxing yourself into too specific of stuff so that it's a general purpose site that can be used for a multitude of different projects, industries, and project types as well.

[00:04:03.210] - Gordon
And tech stack as well, because you might be using different plug-ins or technology depending on what the project requires.

[00:04:10.460] - Taylor
Yeah, exactly. So I try and be as minimal as I can while still giving me a solid foundation that there isn't tonnes to set up outside of setting your colours, setting your fonts and things like that. And it's something that is a battle because it's a lot of work to put in. There's lots of small, tiny details. I'm kind of like "I don't really want to do it. I'll just do it when I start the project." But something that's motivating me to keep going and finishing it and make sure that I have all of these small attention to details is the fact that it's setting it up once and it's done. I don't have to come back to it and do it every single time I start a new site. I don't have to remember to set it up. And so it's these little things I'm trying to make sure that I include so that I don't have to, not start from scratch, but remember a bunch of things that need to be configured again and again. And it takes time, it takes a lot of thought and planning because I have to think about how I'm going to set it up; why I'm setting up; and if it needs to be set up; to make sure that I get the best starter site that works for me. Everyone will have different opinions and processes on how they like their site set up in terms of how they like to name things, the plug-ins that you like to use as their defaults, how they want it to default to look, out of the box. And so it's very specific to each person. So it's not something that you can buy off the shelf from someone else. Well, you could, but it's never going to be exactly the way that you want, and you're going to be fitting yourself into a square hole for a different shape, which is just not going to work because you may like to code things in different ways. You may like to design things in different ways. We all have our own style, so it's something that you can't really outsource, you can't really buy off the shelf. But you can definitely... I'm working with a couple of my friends, and we're sharing all of these different components and ideas for our starter sites. And although the concepts are the same, the way that we have implemented them are completely different, because that's the way that it works for us. So, yeah, it's something that you want to think about if you're going to be doing a task repetitively. Can you set up a base for you to start from so that you don't have to start from scratch every single time, but that gives you enough flexibility that it's not too niche and specific.

[00:07:07.390] - Gordon
And one thing that springs to mind is documentation for this. So if you're setting up loads of classes and variables and so on, I think you need to create a document for yourself with all these classes and styles and variables all listed so that you don't have to then try and remember what they are because you may have put in that you don't use all the time. But unless you documented it, you might forget what it is, and it's going to take you ages just to go and look and find out what it is. So documentation is really good. It also is quite useful. If you do end up giving it to someone or selling it on to other people who might like the way that you work, you've got the documentation all ready to go. And it's the sort of thing that people can then just pick up and start using and then change and use as a basis like you do for their own styling as well. Because I think that sort of thing, you're quite well respected in the GeneratePress and the WordPress community. So people might very much want to start with your base and go from there. If you've got reasons why you've done everything, then there may be a market for it. It might be something for Snippet Club. Who knows?

[00:08:24.300] - Taylor
Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of snippets that I use from Snippet Club that are premium. So obviously you'd have to take that into account. And how you want to share it...

[00:08:35.220] - Gordon
As a sold product, make it a price, and they get access to it, plus any updates that you decide to do. You can say there might not necessarily be any updates is, but if there are, they get access to them as well.

[00:08:47.730] - Taylor
Yeah, something to think about.

[00:08:49.920] - Gordon
Yeah. Anything else you want to say on that?

[00:08:52.170] - Taylor
I don't think so. Yeah, I mean, just the selling of the starter site. It's difficult because a lot of the starter site relies on premium plug-ins that are used and you can't really package them together and sell them because-

[00:09:12.880] - Gordon
No. You can sell styles and things even if the plug-ins aren't part of it.

[00:09:18.110] - Taylor
Sort of. The way my site is set up, the processing and compiling of all of the styles are from another plug-in that processes like SCSS and things like that. So you'd have to have the Block Studio plug-in to be able to use the site at all just because of the way that my child theme is set up. So it's tricky because it's very individual to my tech stack, the plug-ins; I use ACF, I use Block Studio, I use Flying Press, things like that. Whereas I have friends that have very similar workflows but use completely different plug-ins because that's just what they use. I use Fluent Forms and they use Gravity Forms.

[00:10:06.480] - Gordon
So maybe one way you can do it is you can create your starter site for yourself and then take bits out of it because it's a lot easier to take things out than it is to put them in until you get to a flat base point that may be of interest to people. You'll have an idea when you do it if there's going to be enough base stuff left for people to be interested.

[00:10:30.980] - Taylor
Something to look into.

[00:10:31.910] - Gordon
Yeah. So I want to talk today about Dropbox. So Dropbox, for those who don't know, is a service that has a software you install on your computer and your devices, and it allows you to put files into Dropbox, and that will then put them into the cloud, and it will give you access to them in a web-based browser, so you can access your files from anywhere where there's a web-based browser; somewhere that has internet connection, basically. It also allows you to have files on your computer or your devices which are synced with the online versions. So if you, for example, make changes to the file, the file changes are then synced to the cloud version. And one of the big uses for this is over Teams, where you've got several people, 20, 30 people who are all accessing or need to have access to certain files. And instead of having them on a server at your office or paying for space and set up and managing all of the things that go with having your own server, they can just very easily put them on Dropbox, give someone access to Dropbox as part of the team. At any point, they can stop access to those files or to the whole of Dropbox account. And it makes it really easy for businesses to run file sharing, and it can be done with people in different countries and so on and so forth. And it's a great service. It's been around for a long, long time. However, it would seem for some unknown reason, and I'm hoping I've got this completely wrong, and this is not what they're going to do, but for some reason, there is talk of the next version of Dropbox, the client version of Dropbox, requiring you to download all online files and not have any files online only. So what this means is you can only store files in Dropbox that you also have on your computer.

[00:12:49.950] - Taylor
I believe this is for the Dropbox backup service. So anyone that has a personal account or just a normal paid account is fine, but I believe this only applies to the Dropbox backup service, which I think is for backing up things like your computer and things like that. That is what I believe, because it was in a couple of forums about this, and Dropbox have a pink logo, I want to say, or pink background logo, and that is for their Dropbox backup service, and the normal Dropbox is the blue background. So I believe this only affects people that use the backup service.

[00:13:31.720] - Gordon
I'm glad you said that, because the point of my bringing this up is that a third party, in this case, Dropbox, can change what they do, the fundamental service that they offer at any point. And if you have put all your eggs into that basket and all of a sudden you can't do what you need to do and why you're using that service, you don't get a great deal of time to change. I mean, for example, they are only talking about this now, and I think the next version is due in a few days or a couple of weeks or whatever. But it doesn't give you long if that doesn't work for you. For whatever reason, they've changed the rules, and now all of a sudden, you've got to change your whole workflow, and that could impact your business really, really hard because there's a lot of infrastructure that might need changing. You might have things that link to, in this case, Dropbox. You might have files that are on there that are being used elsewhere and being linked to, or you've got them in some sort of automation. There's a whole tonne of things that could just be cut off just because a third party has decided to change their terms or their service. This is one of the reasons why I really like, as far as backup goes in particular, having my own system, as in a box with drives in it that sits under my desk, and I've got control over that. I'm not going to pull my own service away from myself, so it's going to be there all the time. But there are a lot of services that I do rely on. And quite often I do a little check just to make sure that they're still doing what I want them to do. And I also keep an ear to the ground when I'm looking to see if there are similar services around. For example, Vimeo is a service that I use. This is a video hosting platform that's a paid premium product, and they allow me to lock down videos to certain domain names, which is really useful for me. If you're a long-time listener or watcher of this podcast or vidcast, you'll know that I set up a video streaming service for my own videos to be able to deliver them to my customers. And Vimeo is very much a part of that. If, for example, Vimeo decided to pull the plug on not being able to lock down videos to certain domains, I don't know why they would want to do that, but they might, depending on which direction they head in. Then all of a sudden, my whole service is relying on this feature that I no longer have access to. So because of that, I was looking at alternatives and getting a new alternative on board and duplicating my videos onto that service as well because they also have this feature. And it means that if Vimeo go down, I can just switch to 'Adilo,' and it's going to take me maybe a couple of hours just to update all the links. But as far as the customers are concerned, it won't impact them at all, and it won't impact the service that I'm offering. Adilo is another paid-for service, although I got it on a lifetime deal. And it means that I can do effectively the same thing with Adilo as I do with Vimeo, and I can switch to them pretty much overnight. But it's really important. If you rely on a particular service or feature from a particular service, just make sure you've got some sort of backup plan. And if you don't have a backup plan, I don't know why that's a difficult phrase for me to say today, then keep your ear to the ground and just listen out and look out for an alternative. And it might well be that by finding an alternative, you can at least make a note of it and create a document so that should anything go down, you've actually already researched what is possible to move to. Or even get that service and start moving your... Copying over what you need to that service so that you have a backup. And I think that's really important, especially if you rely on that feature or service to make a chunk of money that comes into your business. I'm really pleased to hear that it's only the backup service. I mean, if Dropbox decided that their main service didn't have online-only files, that would really defeat the object of having Dropbox, because that's the one reason people get it, is to have online storage and not have to have it on their computers. Laptops these days are having really fast storage with SSDs built in. But because of the price of SSDs at the moment, the storage is quite low. We have a laptop here. What's the storage on this?

[00:18:53.550] - Taylor
One terabyte.

[00:18:54.700] - Gordon
So one terabyte with SSD is a huge amount for SSD. But most of the time, my laptop, for example, I think I've got 256 gigabytes, which is enough to work on, but only if you've got a load of files on external drives or you've got them on a storage system like Dropbox. If I was forced to have to download all those files onto my computer, I wouldn't be able to use it because I just don't have the space for it. So yeah, I'm pleased that that is the case. But look into Dropbox if you use it and just check that it does what you want it to do and is going to do what you want it to do in the future.

[00:19:38.510] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:19:39.620] - Gordon
That's it for me. Anything else you want to say?

[00:19:41.590] - Taylor
No, that's it for me as well.

[00:19:43.040] - Gordon
Thank you so much for joining us. As always, we can be found on YouTube and on Facebook. We will talk about the Facebook change next week. I'll make a note because that's something that's happening that's affecting us and probably a load of other people, possibly even you without you knowing it. And I'll also want to talk about Frontly, which is another thing that we are going to be looking at next week.

[00:20:06.650] - Taylor
Yep.

[00:20:06.850] - Gordon
So YouTube and Facebook, please like, share and subscribe.

[00:20:11.930] - Taylor
You can always go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.

[00:20:16.960] - Gordon
And we should be on all of your favourite podcast platforms as well. If you find one we're not on, then please let us know. You'll need to search for This Week With Taylor and Gordon. Use the full title to be able to find us. Until next week, 1pm on Friday. My name is Gordon, and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:20:36.710] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:20:39.210] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:20:39.480] - Taylor
Bye.

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Show Notes