Season 4 - Episode 125

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Report of Wordcamp 2023

Met up with WP Umbrella – https://wp-umbrella.com/

Product Hunt – https://www.producthunt.com/

Next years Wordcamp 2024 is in Torino, Italy – https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/

New Podcast – Family and Childrens Entertainers, The Podcast – https://www.facethepodcast.com

All about and for children’s entertainers – now launched

Interviews of entertainers as well as a round-table feature

Website may look familiar…

Site needs a few tweaks but is pretty much there

Thanks to the following generous and talented people Paul Longhurst, Taylor Drayson and Hayley for help putting the website together

 

Visit the website: https://www.thisweekwith.co.uk

Drayson Design Website – https://www.draysondesign.com
The Creative Tinker Website – https://www.thecreativetinker.com

Facebook: https://www.thisweekwith.co.uk/facebook
Youtube: https://www.thisweekwith.co.uk/youtube

* Full transcript will be available on the website. We may receive a referral fee from any of our links which help towards the costs involved in creating this content for you.

[00:00:09.160] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.460] - Taylor
Hello.

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

[00:00:11.710] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.760] - 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 thank you for joining us. How's your seven days been?

[00:00:25.950] - Taylor
It's been busy. I've been traveling a lot.

[00:00:29.080] - Gordon
Have you?

[00:00:30.130] - Taylor
Yes.

[00:00:30.440] - Gordon
Ah yeah, we did know that because last week's was a recorded episode because Taylor wasn't going to be here on the Friday because you were?

[00:00:38.560] - Taylor
I was in Greece, in Athens, at Wordcamp.

[00:00:42.750] - Gordon
Athens in Greece, other way around.

[00:00:44.720] - Taylor
Yeah. And it was great. I really enjoyed it. I got to meet a lot of cool people, people that I'd met online. Got to visit with the stand and I got some pins that went on my entrance...

[00:01:00.150] - Gordon
Lanyard?

[00:01:00.890] - Taylor
Lanyard. Lots of good talks, lots of workshops. I built my first Gutenberg block using "React" which is a completely different language that I don't understand, but I'm getting better. And I'm currently working on a new or converting a short code which embeds the WordPress playground, which is something I'll talk about in another episode. But I'm basically using what I learned at Wordcamp to build another block, which will hopefully be cool. But yeah, it was great. I enjoyed traveling. I had some nice food, exploring the city. I walked up the Acropolis, the Parthenon. And yeah, it was really good fun. They released next year's location, which is Torino in Italy.

[00:01:51.830] - Gordon
Okay, that sounds good.

[00:01:53.830] - Taylor
And hopefully, yeah, more people that I know will be going. Hopefully, some of my friends who, it was last minute that I made friends with and I was like, "you should come along," and just didn't have enough time to plan it. So hopefully next year, I will have more friends that I can hang out with. I met a couple of people that I use their plug-ins, so one of them being the maintenance solution that I use, which is WP Umbrella.

[00:02:25.750] - Gordon
Okay, yeah. And did you talk to them about what they were doing or how you used it? What was the discussion about?

[00:02:33.550] - Taylor
I'd spoken to them last year about it because they had a booth last year, and that was where I found out about them. So he recognized me from last year's Wordcamp, which was cool. And we had a good chat. He told me what was coming up, what was in the pipeline, which was cool. And they launched on Product Hunt on the Contributors' Day.

[00:02:54.420] - Gordon
Nice. So for those who don't know, you can go to producthunt.com. And it's a place where people who create software, software as a service, or cool little tools will post their new tool, their new product, and you can have your product hunted by everyone and basically hope to become the most popular for that day, which is really good. It's a nice way to get your name out there, isn't it?

[00:03:25.440] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:03:26.000] - Gordon
Have you put Snippet Club on there?

[00:03:27.710] - Taylor
I haven't.

[00:03:28.430] - Gordon
Well, there you go. There's something you might want to do. That'd be quite cool. So you saw WP Umbrella. Anyone else?

[00:03:36.420] - Taylor
Yoast, who is the founder of "Yoast SEO," who he no longer works on the product. He runs his own company, investment company called Emilia Capital, where he invests in WordPress plug-ins, tool services, so things like InstaWP, which is a way to quickly spin up a new WordPress installation on a server, which is nice, and lots of other different products in the WordPress ecosystem.

[00:04:11.170] - Gordon
Very good. So it was a good trip. You're glad you went.

[00:04:16.520] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:04:16.820] - Gordon
So biggest highlight?

[00:04:20.540] - Taylor
I mean, announcing next year's event is always exciting because everyone's wanting to know because there's maybe four or five people that know because Matthew Mullenweg knows, Josepha knows, a couple of other people, and then obviously people that have put themselves forward to run next year's event and run it, they obviously know as well. So there's not many people that know. And so it's always exciting to find out.

[00:04:53.060] - Gordon
And I may be joining you next year.

[00:04:54.690] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:04:54.870] - Gordon
So that'll be exciting as well.

[00:04:56.960] - Taylor
Get to come to your first Wordcamp.

[00:04:58.250] - Gordon
Another little trip for me. Yeah, it'll be nice. Good. Anything else you want to say about your time away?

[00:05:04.100] - Taylor
Apart from the... What's the word?

[00:05:12.040] - Gordon
Just asking a slightly different question while you're thinking of that. If anyone's watching and they're not a WordPress developer, for example, is there any reason for them to go? They may be just a WordPress user.

[00:05:24.180] - Taylor
I mean, yeah, there's lots of talks on a lot of non technical topics. You have things that are agency focused, you have accessibility, you have running a blog, for example, and creating content. There's quite a few AI talks, which is obviously inevitable because it's the latest thing. But yeah, there's lots of different topics for people and there's not just workshops for how to code. There's workshops on all different things. So if you're interested in WordPress or you run a WordPress website, blog and you're interested in traveling, meeting people, you can learn probably a lot because you can ask people who have been in the business and the ecosystem for what now, 20 years. We've just hit 20 years since WordPress was released, which was a big milestone. So there's lots of people with lots of knowledge.

[00:06:27.560] - Gordon
There is, yeah. Oh, that's very good. Anything you want to just finish off with? Did you remember what you were going to say?

[00:06:32.630] - Taylor
Yeah, apart from the delays at the airport, everything went really well.

[00:06:36.980] - Gordon
Yeah, you got home really late as well, early I should say. It was like early hours of the morning. Ah the joys of getting cheap airlines, eh?

[00:06:48.090] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:06:48.650] - Gordon
Good. Anything else?

[00:06:49.690] - Taylor
No, that's everything.

[00:06:50.160] - Gordon
Okay, so today I would like to talk about my new podcast. Talking of WordPress. So we do this one This Week With. And a little while ago, I decided I would like to do one for family and children's entertainers. And I was trying to come up with a name, and Family And Children's Entertainers spelt out FACE. And I thought, "Oh, I quite like that." And so we called it "FACE: The Podcast." So Family And Children's Entertainers: The Podcast. So it's all about family and children's entertainers and what they do and how they do it. And the idea is to try and get a bit of recognition because in the world of magic, children's entertainers are seen as sort of the lower tier if you like. Clowns, kids parties. They're not taken as seriously as they should be because I can guarantee you there's an awful lot of magicians out there who do children's parties and maybe don't tell anyone in the magic world because they want to be seen as a more serious magician. But it's the bread and butter for magic. I suspect that most people see a children's entertainer as a magician as the first experience they have of the magic arts, of magic. I suspect that's the case because we're seen all over the place; at children's birthday parties, at weddings, at schools. There are so many different places that children's and family entertainers entertain. Holiday parks, there's all sorts. So I think children see the children's entertainers, and it's their first experience of magic. And it shapes how they feel about magic going forwards. So it's a really important type of magic that we do. And I'm not sure we get the right recognition for it. So my plan was to go and interview some well known or unusual family and children entertainers; people who do things slightly differently; people who do things really well. And just talk to them, and interview them, and come out with a podcast, which I was also going to video, because we do that for This Week With so everything's in place for that. And it also then allows me to do all the transcriptions and the subtitles just as we do for this podcast. And so that's what I've done.

[00:09:24.820] - Taylor
Okay.

[00:09:25.360] - Gordon
So we now have, and it's been soft launched, so I'm telling a few people about it, and you guys are one of those people I'm going to tell. Facethepodcast.com. Now, it's not going to be of much interest to you unless you are a magician or a family and children's entertainer, but feel free to check it out. You might recognize the style of the website.

[00:09:51.280] - Taylor
You stole it.

[00:09:52.300] - Gordon
I didn't steal it. I copied the layout from This Week With, because This Week With works really well, and we've redesigned it three times now. So the one we've got now is what we've come up with to overcome all the things that we wanted in the past but weren't able to do. And we then redesigned it. So it seemed like a logical step to duplicate the layout and the functionality. It does look very different. It is a very different style. It's more colourful. It's more, it's more bright. This Week With is a very dark website. So by all means, go and have a look, see what you think. I am doing it slightly differently because on the first episode, which is a very well known children's entertainer in the magic world called Terry Herbert. I went to his house and we set up two cameras, one on him and one on me and him. And I've edited it all up so that it looks really good. It sounds good. We get rid of all the bits that aren't relevant. And it took a long time to do. And in fact, I did it twice because I edited it all, and then my computer died, as you may have heard in past episodes. And so when I got the computer back, I basically had to re-edit it all over again.

[00:11:23.170] - Taylor
Even better.

[00:11:25.050] - Gordon
Yes. I'd made a few decisions, and then some of the decisions I'd made, I couldn't remember what they were. So I had to redo those bits. But yes, you're right. It is better having had time to redo it again. Although it's also very frustrating...

[00:11:43.450] - Taylor
I can imagine.

[00:11:43.910] - Gordon
To repeat work you've already done. Especially as it's a podcast, because podcasts don't earn me any money. They're something I do for the love of it, and in this case, to get some more recognition. And so yeah, that is pretty much launched now. There's a few minor bits and pieces that still need fixing. The mobile view is needing a few tweaks so that it looks better than it does currently. It looks great on a website, on a desktop. And hopefully, I already have, let's see, I've got three more episodes that have already been recorded. So I had four episodes recorded. The plan was to have quite a few before I launched it. But because of this delay with the editing, I thought I'll just get it out there and let people know about it. And then as new episodes come through, those people that have subscribed will be told about it, and then they can have a look and see what the new one is. So I've got three episodes that now need editing. I've got the style all set out as far as the editing goes, all the transitions, the captions, the titles, all of that, the music. It's all been chosen and decided upon. So it's going to be easy to keep it in the same style and hopefully edit it up quite quickly. One thing that is different is that I'm doing three entertainers or children's entertainers, family entertainers. We're doing an interview for each of them. And then the fourth episode is going to be a roundtable with those three entertainers and myself...

[00:13:24.250] - Taylor
That sounds good.

[00:13:25.440] - Gordon
Talking about the state of children's entertainment as it is at the moment, which is very different. I haven't heard anyone do that before in a podcast. Magic podcast in particular. And I think it will be nice to get lots of different views from different people with different experiences all together and have a discussion about things. So hopefully that will all work well.

[00:13:51.350] - Taylor
You'll have to keep us updated.

[00:13:52.510] - Gordon
I will indeed. If you are interested in subscribing to it and listening to it, it's on all of the big social media... Social media, all the big podcast platforms. Do a search for "Family and Children's Entertainers: The Podcast," and you will find it. And there's links on the website, which is facethepodcast.com.

[00:14:15.140] - Taylor
Wonderful.

[00:14:15.820] - Gordon
There you go. And I have to say, before we carry on and just end this episode, that I wouldn't have been able to put it all together without the help of Taylor. So thank you very much to you for that.

[00:14:29.660] - Taylor
You're very welcome.

[00:14:29.910] - Gordon
I'd also like to thank a couple of other people as well, really quickly. One is Paul Longhurst. He's been on this show before, and he's always my sounding board. If I come up with these ideas, I always go to him first and go, "Does this sound like something that other people are going to like, or is it just something that I'm doing for myself?" And so he's been very supportive. So thank you, Paul. And also, Hayley, we mentioned her last week. She does all the transcriptions of our episodes, which are normally between 20, 25 minutes or so for This Week With, and I gave her an hour and 12 minutes video to transcribe for us. And she just did it and got it done really quickly. So thank you to her once again. That's two weeks running now, we've thanked her. But it is a really important job, and she does do a really good job on it. So thank you. That's it for me.

[00:15:26.380] - Taylor
That's it for me as well.

[00:15:27.490] - Gordon
Thank you so much for joining us. As always, please like, share, and subscribe. The more subscribers we get, the bigger that we can grow our viewership on this show and hopefully make it better and better. So please like, share, and subscribe. We can be found on Facebook and on YouTube.

[00:15:46.640] - 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.

[00:15:53.750] - Gordon
This is quite a short episode compared to normal, but I think we've been quite concise and got everything we needed to say into it.

[00:16:03.520] - Taylor
Yeah, we've been catching up.

[00:16:03.750] - Gordon
Yeah. So next week, please join us. We will be here at 1pm on Friday, as always, assuming nothing goes wrong. So please join us then. Thank you for joining us. My name is Gordon, and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:16:21.840] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:16:24.580] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:16:26.020] - Taylor
Bye.

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