[00:00:09.05] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.21] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:10.07] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:12.02] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.28] - 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 7 days. And thank you for joining us.

[00:00:23.23] - Taylor
Welcome back.

[00:00:24.26] - Gordon
It's been a week of shows for me. So we are doing The Diary of Anne Frank, and that has been going on. We've had two performances— well, sorry, we've had one performance, another one tonight, and then two tomorrow. And it's going okay.

[00:00:42.24] - Taylor
Good.

[00:00:43.04] - Gordon
Yeah, when are you coming?

[00:00:45.18] - Taylor
I'm coming this evening.

[00:00:46.27] - Gordon
Ah, fantastic. So that will be nice. Didn't know you were coming today. So yeah. It's a huge show, so many props, about 250 props in this show, something like that. And there's costume changes on the stage. Because of the play, all the actors, once they're on the stage, they stay on the stage. They don't go anywhere, they stay there. So they have to, you know, find things to do, you know, it's all part of the acting. And also make sure that, you know, you change into the right costume for the right scene. Make sure that you've got everything you need in the right place. There's an awful lot to think about. But anyway, that is that. If you are around and you watch this in time, there's a performance tonight and then there's two on Saturday tomorrow. So that's the matinee and the evening. Just do a search for parlorplayers.co.uk for tickets. Right, shall we get straight into our topics?

[00:01:48.25] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:01:49.07] - Gordon
Would you like to go first or shall I?

[00:01:50.21] - Taylor
You can go first this week.

[00:01:52.01] - Gordon
I have been doing lots of sorting. Now I've got lots and lots of props that I've had for many, many years, some that I've used, some that I haven't used— quite a lot I haven't used— some that are worth a lot of money, some that are just a lot of tat, and they need sorting. So I've got my storage room and I ordered boxes from IKEA to put into the shelving, but I thought there's not much point— if I'm going to do this, I should do it correctly. I should do it the right way the first time, rather than just put everything into boxes, put them on the shelf, and be done with it. It makes a lot more sense to actually sort of sort through them, figure out what goes in each box, and have sort of a theme for each box. So maybe it'll be playing cards, maybe it'll be props for close-up, props for children's parties, that sort of thing, and then put them in the boxes, but also to make a list of what's going in each box, because then I can create a spreadsheet and I can then do a search and know where everything is, or even just look at the spreadsheet and go, "ah, I'd forgotten I've got that," and then I'll know exactly where it is.

[00:03:11.09]
And so this has— this idea is a good idea, but it has sort of stopped me from doing it because I wanted to do it right, and I thought, I don't want to do it again. And so every time I go up to sort of look at it and there's stuff all over the floor and there's a load of things in the dining room as well, I thought we would, I would put everything in the boxes and then sort through them. It's like, "no, no, no, just do it right the first time, get it right. And do it once." And I've been in that room quite a bit because with the play that I'm in, I've been making little presents for people, which I gave them yesterday and they really liked them. They are little books which say "The Diary of Anne Frank" and they're 3D-printed boxes with what's called a living hinge on the side. It looks a little bit like a like a— what would you call it— a sort of a slinky type thing, and it's used in woodworking if you're going around a bend, you sort of cut it, score it if you like, and then bend it over, and it's that, and it's great, it's really good, and I wrote a little poem for everybody using AI which went inside so that when they had it they got a nice little poem as well, and so that's been you know, quite a big task because I had to make— I think there was 19 of those in the end, 19 or 20, one of the two.

[00:04:43.03]
And they take— or they took 4 hours for every 2 that I did. So, and a lot— quite a bit of filament. I ran out of filament at one point, I had to put new one in. Luckily I had just the right amount, but I do need to reorder red because I've run out of red now. So I was up there and I kept looking at the boxes and thinking, "Oh, I should really do this," but then I had to do the poems and then I had to, you know, pack everything and make sure they were all done and I had a friend, or two friends in fact, that were coming around yesterday and we sort of spent a bit of time with them and saw them and then they came to the play in the evening which was lovely. And so it's been a bit of a sort of a whirlwind type week, and I haven't really got a great deal done, but show week is always like that, you know. There's so much thought process that goes into each show every day. You've got to make sure you don't forget anything, you've got to make sure everything's in the right place, you're wearing the right costumes, etc., etc., and then you've got to remember the lines and act when you're on the stage.

[00:05:55.14]
So there's a huge amount to think about, and it's really quite, quite tiring. So by the time, you know, it comes round to the next day, I've been, you know, sort of quite tired. And also this week I've had 2 hospital shows. I went and did a hospital show on Tuesday and another one on Wednesday, so that's half a day for each of them gone as well. So that cuts down on the amount of time I had, plus there's a load of emails. It's been one of those weeks really, just a busy, busy week, but we won't be with you next week. I'll explain why a little bit later, but that's, that's where I am. I'm still waiting for IKEA to bring me, or send me rather, the replacement lids for the boxes that got damaged when they sent them. So that sort of stopped me from doing it as well, because I don't want to sort of get to a point when I'm all done and all I've got to do is put the lids on and they're not here, and I, you know, it's not a finished job then. So I was waiting for those.

[00:06:52.23]
Seems they're not going to be coming anytime soon. So, you know, talk to IKEA again on that. But yes, there we go. Show week, busy week, very little else gets done. What would you like to talk about today?

[00:07:05.18] - Taylor
So I was helping a friend with a plug-in called 'Noted!'

[00:07:11.05] - Gordon
Oh yes.

[00:07:11.21] - Taylor
So Noted is a plug-in that Kyle from The Admin Bar built and put onto the WordPress repository. And the idea was that it allowed you to add notes to your WordPress website. So, there's times when you have things that are specific to a website. So, maybe you added a feature, maybe you added a page to your website that is specific to that client, and you're not going to remember when you come back in 6 months' time why you did something.

[00:07:43.27] - Gordon
I do this all the time.

[00:07:44.23] - Taylor
Where you did something.

[00:07:45.29] - Gordon
Yeah.

[00:07:46.14] - Taylor
How you did it. And he basically built this tiny little plug-in for himself because he wanted to solve a problem that was keeping track of things that were specific to that client. And he doesn't really know how to code. He had help from AI, he had help from a friend to get it onto the repository in the first place. And there were people that had requested for features, new things added, they'd submitted issues and bugs, and Kyle kind of just said, "Thank you, thank you for your suggestion," and kind of left it at that. Because it wasn't that he didn't want to, it's just he didn't know how, didn't have the skills and time and energy to look into it and spend more time, because again, it's a free plug-in. And so I wanted a reason to use my new package that I built. So the settings framework that I wrote for as like a helper. And I thought this is a great kind of use case to kind of test to see how it works. And the plug-in didn't have a settings page when I originally, you know, when I started looking at it, but because it was open source, anybody can contribute, anyone can add stuff, suggest things.

[00:09:02.18]
So I thought, let me take what Kyle's done and have a look at some of the things that people have submitted that are bugs, have a look at some of the suggestions. And some of the suggestions are actually very, very good, and, you know, would have enhanced the plug-in better. So, I took those and I kind of built a new version with my framework that I had written, and it worked really well. The settings took 5 minutes to build, looks professional, is all standardised, and, you know, is really easy to add. As I was building it out, I was like, "oh, this would be a nice feature to add. I can add that as a setting as well so people can choose and control what they want to enable and disable." And some of the features were being able to pin notes. So if you had a note that you wanted to always be at the top of the list, for example, you could pin it. Other things were adding things like block editor support. So, because it was in the admin bar where you could open the panel, the block editor doesn't have the admin bar visible.

[00:09:59.01]
And so you couldn't open the panel if you were editing a page. So, I added support so that you could access it, but also add things like per-block comments or notes. So you can actually add a note to a specific block itself, you know, you've got direct correlation between this is this section, this is a review section. You could say 'pulls in from Trustpilot' or 'pulls in from Google,' whatever it does, so that when you come back to it you don't go, "oh, where does this— where do the reviews come from?" You kind of have an inline note to yourself. The other one I added was the ability to choose who could add notes, because originally it was just administrators, but also who could view notes. I think there are some times where you actually want the client to be able to see the notes that you've made, because, you know, sometimes context is good if they're going and editing the site, but you don't want them to be able to edit or add new notes to the website. You know, you just want them to be able to be read-only.

[00:10:56.07]
And so I added those as settings, so you could select which user role could access them, etc. And just these kind of small features I then pushed to the WordPress repository. Kyle made a lovely post about it in The Admin Bar and said thank you and shouted my name out, which was lovely. But, you know, I was helping, giving back to the community. You know, lots of people had ideas that I thought were pretty easy to implement, so I kind of went ahead and did it. And I'm kind of going to probably maintain the plug-in going forward. You know, Kyle added me as a contributor. And again, I'll just kind of help out as and when I can. It's not a big plug-in, so it's not going to need tonnes of maintenance. And it's never going to be a big plug-in either. The idea is—

[00:11:43.02] - Gordon
It does one job really well, doesn't it?

[00:11:44.23] - Taylor
Yeah, the idea is keep it simple. And, you know, do that well. You know, fix bugs if they have conflicts, I added a compatibility kind of integration. So if there are other plug-ins that conflict where they disable scripts from other plug-ins just for better performance, I can add that compatibility back in so that it does work in the admin.

[00:12:08.27] - Gordon
And does this allow you to put notes in the dashboard, like the WP admin bar place?

[00:12:15.05] - Taylor
So you, it will add a new dashboard widget and show your pinned posts.

[00:12:21.00] - Gordon
Okay.

[00:12:21.11] - Taylor
So it only shows pinned ones because they're likely to be the most important. Again, I could in the future add the option and have more controls because currently you can just add a title, add a description, and that's it. You can't say who has visibility to view it, you can't say it's 'private,' so only you as the person that's created it, and you can't choose or reorder anything. But you know, there's the ability to add that in the future perhaps. But at the moment, it's kind of just keeping it simple.

[00:12:49.13] - Gordon
Because we did this before, didn't we, on a couple of my sites, I think, when it was something like— I think maybe the invites one is one of them— where there's, on the dashboard, there's some information that, you know, because I don't need to change something or add new information in too often, it's not something I would have remembered. So we added it in manually, didn't we?

[00:13:11.28] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:13:12.12] - Gordon
So this would be able to replace that, I would guess.

[00:13:15.20] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:13:16.08] - Gordon
Very good. All right, well, we'll put a link to the repository where you can download this, in the show notes. So if this is something that you think might be of use to you, then please go and download it. If you just want to have a look, go download it, have a play, and leave any comments and feedback on the repository, and I'm sure Taylor will pick them up in time. Anything else you want to say about that?

[00:13:42.16] - Taylor
I don't think so. It was a fun little project. It took me an afternoon or so and, yeah, helped out a lot of people.

[00:13:48.26] - Gordon
I think everyone is also, you know, concerned about your washing machine. Any news on that?

[00:13:55.18] - Taylor
My dishwasher.

[00:13:56.03] - Gordon
Your dishwasher, sorry. Yes.

[00:13:57.04] - Taylor
Nothing at the moment. Still waiting.

[00:13:59.06] - Gordon
All that manual cleaning you're having to do.

[00:14:02.06] - Taylor
Yeah, I try just not to eat basically.

[00:14:05.07] - Gordon
Or eat out. Right, well, that's everything from me. I mentioned in my topic that we weren't going to be having an episode next week, and that's because I'm away. I'm at our 'Trix in the Stix,' although it's not called that anymore, it's just called Trix, T-R-I-X, and it's a children's entertainer convention. I'm going to be away for that from Monday, and I won't be back in time for us to record an episode, so we won't be with you next week, but we will be with you the following week. It does mean that I won't be going to the cinema next week either. Didn't go this week because I had dress rehearsal, won't be going next week. It's 2 weeks in a row, sorry about that. Yeah, we'll sort it for the week after. So thank you for joining us. If you have any comments or you would like to share, please do so. We are on YouTube, you can like, share, and subscribe.

[00:15:00.07] - Taylor
You can also go to thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.

[00:15:04.12] - Gordon
And if you would prefer to listen to us, we are on all the major podcast platforms and on your smart speaker. Just search for "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." We'll be back with you in 2 weeks on the Friday at 1pm. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:15:21.02] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:15:23.15] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:15:23.29] - Taylor
Bye.

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Show Notes