[00:00:09.000] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.360] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:09.810] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:11.790] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.750] - 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 to everybody.

[00:00:24.610] - Taylor
Welcome back.

[00:00:25.800] - Gordon
Yeah. It's been a busy week, as always.

[00:00:29.110] - Taylor
Yes.

[00:00:29.860] - Gordon
We were talking about a couple of things last week, which we're going to go over this week. But before we do, I am hoping that everyone is able to watch this okay, because we've had a few issues, one of which we will come to in a moment, the main issue, in fact, all about Facebook. Anything you've got to say before we start?

[00:00:52.480] - Taylor
I don't think so.

[00:00:53.550] - Gordon
Okay. Let's get straight into it then. If you do actually enjoy what we do or you get any value from it, then please like and subscribe. The more subscribers we get, the more we enjoy doing this. We enjoy doing it anyway, but if we know people are watching it, it does help. So do you want to go first or shall I?

[00:01:14.370] - Taylor
You can go first this week.

[00:01:16.100] - Gordon
So let's touch on the problem that we have recently faced. On the 22nd of April, I think that's the right date, Facebook decided that... Well, they didn't decide. Facebook cut off API access to groups. So if you've got a Facebook group, you can no longer use Facebook's API to put content onto it, basically. That's it in very simple terms. And we use a Facebook group for This Week With. So that's caused us a bit of a problem. And last week was the first time we had to do anything about it. So we use a software called Restream, which is something that we've spoken about in the past, and this allows us to broadcast or transmit to YouTube and to Facebook at the same time. And because we have a Facebook group, because at the time that was the better option for what we were doing to put this out for everybody, we are affected. Now, there is a workaround, and it's not a great workaround because it adds an extra step, but it does actually give us something that we've been looking to do for quite a long time.

[00:02:33.350] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:02:34.640] - Gordon
So the extra step is that I now have to create earlier in the week a Facebook group event, and then that will give us a streaming key, and the streaming key then needs to get put in to Restream just before we start our broadcast so that it knows to send it through to Facebook groups. It's a bit of a faff, in fact, because it's an extra step that we didn't have to do previously. We could just go live and it would just automatically create the event for us. So it's a bit of a faff. But the one thing that it does do, which is something we may or may not take advantage of, is it gives us an iframe in Facebook groups to allow us to basically embed it into a website. So that means that not only can we go live on Facebook and on YouTube, we can also go live on our website.

[00:03:38.420] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:03:38.620] - Gordon
Now, did we have this previously? I can't remember. Did we have a countdown at any point for episodes?

[00:03:48.150] - Taylor
I don't think so.

[00:03:49.100] - Gordon
No. Okay. So what this means is, and again, it's an extra step unless, of course, it's a one-off and it uses the same stream key every time, in which case I don't think we have to change the embed code. I don't know. We have to look at that. But it means that we could, if we wanted, stream live to our website via Facebook. So basically, you'll be getting the same feed as Facebook was getting. Now, this is something that I think would be quite good because it's something we've wanted to do for a while now. The downside is we did this last week and I found that the stream came in about two, three minutes after it should have done. So we're already talking in the Facebook stream for last week, and I don't know what the issue was with that. It could have been something that we didn't set up properly. I don't know. But hopefully, if you are watching this on Facebook, it's worked this week. We will find out. Let us know in the comments if it's worked or not. We'll come back to you with this once we've had a bit more time with it and see what our new workflow is going to look like, so that if anyone else is looking to do this in a group, then you can learn from our experience on this. We'll also let you know if we decide to do the live thing, because if we do, I think what we'll probably do is we'll bring up the live on the homepage on the day that we're going live. So we can just move everything down and have a 'going live' and a countdown timer and then have it go live at the right time, and then disappear until it's time for the next one. I think that's something that we would like to do if we decide to go live, because I think that's the best thing rather than having an extra page, isn't it?

[00:05:50.740] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:05:52.080] - Gordon
Anything else you want to say on this, Taylor?

[00:05:54.310] - Taylor
I don't think so. It's just Facebook changing.

[00:05:58.280] - Gordon
Yeah, we spoke about this last week about third parties just changing the rules and pulling the rug from beneath you. Once you've got everything all set up and running how you like it, someone can just pull that rug out and all of a sudden you're having to find new ways of doing things. So this is just a prime example of that. So that's pretty much all I need to say. What would you like to talk about today, Taylor?

[00:06:23.640] - Taylor
I'm going to talk about 'Frontly.' So we have a spreadsheet that we keep track of all the software that we own, lifetime deals, annual monthly subscriptions, and categorise it to keep a track of what products we own, who owns them, how much we've spent, what categories we have. And Frontly allows you to create web apps from a Google spreadsheet. So what we did is we just took the existing spreadsheet we had and passed it into Frontly. This is really useful because it allows us to display the data in different ways, be able to filter the data easily, and just have a nice UI that we can easily digest and find the information we're looking for.

[00:07:18.960] - Gordon
So Frontly is really, really good. We've not really looked into it much before, even though we set up a Frontly app before for when I was doing my Community Day, we had all the acts listed, and I think we've also attempted to do it for our SodaStream, but I'm not sure we got very far.

[00:07:38.690] - Taylor
No.

[00:07:39.180] - Gordon
You've actually used it for a personal reason, haven't you?

[00:07:42.220] - Taylor
Yeah, I've used it in the past for tracking my stoma suppliers and things like that, which worked well.

[00:07:49.840] - Gordon
But it is actually getting a lot of updates all the time, and we haven't looked at it, really, since we purchased it and had the initial look at it. And since then, there's been an awful lot of updates.

[00:08:04.030] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:08:04.240] - Gordon
It's come on in leaps and bounds, really. But that does mean putting time aside to actually learn it, which is what we did over the weekend, in fact. Last weekend, we sat down and thought, "Right, let's learn this a bit," because it's a really quick and easy way to bring up web apps with data that can be manipulated by the user, which is really good.

[00:08:29.220] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:08:29.640] - Gordon
The one that we are actually doing now, the software list, if you like, is really quite useful because we do have, I think it's something like 250-ish apps or Software As A Service that we've purchased. And not all of them are active. Some of them we've lost because they've been discontinued. But it's actually really useful to be able to search through and just see see what we have. So if we're looking for something that will write something in AI as a blog post, for example, we can do a search for that, do a search for AI. And if we're looking for something to generate an image for us, we've got that. If we're looking for a WordPress plug-in, something we want to do, a calendar, for example, we got several options for that. And it's a really nice way to just remind ourselves what we have and be able to see what we've got in different views and just remind ourselves what's there. But Frontly's really good. Do you want to mention something about the AI side of it? Because that's really interesting.

[00:09:43.970] - Taylor
So they have a builder, an app builder, essentially. So you tell it what the app is supposed to do, the features, the functionality, type of pages, what it's going to be used for. And then it will then generate you the database architecture for the spreadsheets and also the pages and add in the different blocks. So whether it's a table block, whether it's a stat block, and it gives you a starting point on your apps and how you could set them up and use them. It doesn't always do a great job, but it gets you at least a head start.

[00:10:28.200] - Gordon
I think it depends how complex your system is. One of the things that we're looking to do with apps in the future is to allow users who have to log in to be able to bookmark or favourite items within the app. And that's not as easy to do at the moment.

[00:10:48.950] - Taylor
No.

[00:10:49.230] - Gordon
Not on scale, anyway. We've already spoken to the developers about it, and they are considering adding this feature in, so that'll be really cool if they do.

[00:10:58.680] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:10:59.060] - Gordon
And I think there's going to a lot of use for it. I don't think it's just going to be us that want that.

[00:11:03.100] - Taylor
Definitely.

[00:11:03.980] - Gordon
So developers are... the way that software lives or dies, really. If developers are really good, then if there are problems with a software, as long as the developers are good and receptive and they'll communicate well, you don't mind hanging on, do you? Because you can go to them with issues and let them come back to you with fixes or workarounds. It's if you have issues and no one's there and no one's listening to you, and you can't contact support in any way, that's when you give up on things and move on to something else or get a refund, that sort of thing. And these developers are very good.

[00:11:46.510] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:11:47.770] - Gordon
Anything else you want to say on anything?

[00:11:50.100] - Taylor
I don't think so.

[00:11:51.030] - Gordon
Okay, there we go. A reasonably short episode based on our normal episode length, but I think we've covered quite a lot there. We'll put a link to Frontly in the show notes for you. And if there's some information about the Facebook group changes, we'll put a link to that in as well so that you've got that as a resource for you. Thank you for joining us. As always, you can find us on Facebook and on YouTube, and maybe soon our website. Please like, share and subscribe.

[00:12:28.420] - Taylor
You can also go to our website, thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.

[00:12:33.370] - Gordon
And if you prefer to listen to our episodes, then we're going to be on most of the popular podcast platforms. They do actually come out a little bit later than the one o'clock because we have to go through and actually add them in. So that normally gets done later on the Friday or over the next couple of days. So watch them first if you want to see them at one o'clock. Listen to them from Monday onwards. Until next week, Friday at 1pm, if you're watching. My name is Gordon, and I am from Drayson Design.

[00:13:09.610] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:13:12.200] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:13:12.810] - Taylor
Bye.

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Show Notes