[00:00:09.130] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.460] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:09.920] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:11.840] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.960] - 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 in the last seven days. And welcome back.
[00:00:23.830] - Taylor
Welcome back.
[00:00:24.720] - Gordon
Thank you very much for joining us. Any news, first of all, Taylor?
[00:00:29.380] - Taylor
I don't think so. Not from me.
[00:00:31.130] - Gordon
I don't think there's any from me. The Apple products are out, so been hearing a little bit about that, but let's get straight into our topics. So I'll go first.
[00:00:43.310] - Taylor
Okay.
[00:00:44.080] - Gordon
So last week I spoke about an LMS and I talked about it at the end of the episode. Did you know what LMS stood for? Well, it stands for Learning Management System. So what it is, is it's a software. So let me just go back a bit. A CMS is a Content Management System. So what they've done is they've basically called it an LMS, which is similar, but it's for people who want to learn. So it's for people who want to put out courses or anything where you learn, basically. And it's a way to create a course, a video course, or an audio course, or a written course and allow people to sign up for it. And they can then work their way through that course. And it can teach them things; it can allow them to have some sort of certification at the end of it; it can have a quiz section in it so that you can ask people questions about what they've learned. You can have a way to make them free or paid so you can offer a course for free. And you can also create a system so that you've got people who can put their own courses up. So you can have, for example, a teacher who's created a course, put their course onto your LMS or your system. They will then get a percentage of any sales that are made through your system.
[00:02:23.870] - Taylor
A kind of big example would be Udemy and things like that. They are solutions that allow people to post their own courses onto their website and then sell them and yeah, that's one of the biggest examples, I think, that people would understand what LMS is.
[00:02:39.410] - Gordon
I've had a few courses from them, actually. They've got some really good courses on there and it's a really great way to learn at your own pace. Whatever it is you want to learn, whether that be a language or some sort of computer software. That's quite a popular one, isn't it?
[00:02:54.870] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:02:55.510] - Gordon
Or in my case, magic or balloons. So why am I telling you all this? Well, on my children's magic website, for a long time now, I've had a shop, and on that shop you could download, sorry not download, you could purchase the Magic Hands of Mystery DVD and you could purchase an audio CD with sound effects on it for games that I play. And I had a separate website, completely separate, called Online Magic Secrets. And on there I created a few courses. So I filmed one in Bali for making balloon models, and that was all put together so that I could sell it as a course. I also had one for Magic Tricks You Can Do another one for the Magic Hands of Mystery, which was an online version of the DVD that I had. And they were all sort of on this separate website. And the problem with having them all on a separate website is a you've got to manage and update it, which is what you should do for any website anyway, but it was separate to everything else. You also have to promote it, and unless people know about the website, you're not going to get many sales. You might get a few through search engines if they find you, but that's it, really. So the website domain, onlinemagicsecrets, was coming up for renewal and I thought, "well, I don't really want to renew it because hardly anyone has actually bought a course on there," because I just didn't have the time or impetus to go and promote it. But I thought, "I don't want to lose these courses because I've put a lot of time and effort into them." So the idea originally was to bring them over to my children's magic website, my disbelieving.com website, and put them on there. But again, as soon as you put WooCommerce, which is a WordPress shop, in fact, shopping cart system, if you like, as soon as you put that onto your website, it gets bogged down into all sorts of extra code that's just not needed. So Taylor suggested we create a separate subdomain to disbelieving.com and put the shop on there, and then I can link to it from the main site without bogging down my main site. And it would also then have all the links to my normal website, so people could go from there to my normal website and it'll look like it's part of my website, even though it's a separate subdomain. And so we've been working on it, haven't we?
[00:05:47.550] - Taylor
We have.
[00:05:48.220] - Gordon
Now, it's not ready yet, it's not quite finished, we've got a few little bits to go. But I managed to bring the courses over and in fact, I changed my LMS. So I was originally using one called Sensei, which is one I purchased from Code Canyon, I believe. I think that's where I got it originally. WooCommerce then bought it out and sort of brought it into their stable of products. And it's not that one that I'm using now. I'm using one called Tutor LMS. Now, I bought a lifetime deal for this. I've got five licences. This is the only licence I'm actually using currently, and so we need to figure out how to use it, first of all. But we also had to figure out how to bring the existing courses over. Now, these are video courses, so the videos are kept on Vimeo or Adilo and then the different lessons that you create needed to be recreated with the text and the description and everything, and then the videos were just attached to that. So I've done that, that's all done. We got a few little bits to finish, like the payment part of it, that needs doing, and the forgotten password and the sort of the account management side of it, and then it's all done. Now, one of the reasons I wanted to do this is because I used to give out in my deluxe children's party a DVD, which was the Magic Hands of Mystery. And that's all good and well. I was getting people saying to me, "we don't have a DVD player anymore, we can't use it, so don't worry about that." And I was thinking, "yeah, this is the way it's going." Because that's the problem we had with my other videos that I do every year, the dance school shows and the pantomimes and so forth, people weren't having DVD players, they weren't able to play them. So by moving it over into a digital version, what I can do now, which I haven't been able to do for a long time, is give access to the customers who purchased my deluxe package, access to the course for free. So all I need to do is, Taylor built this system last week in fact, I just need to add into a secret form the name and email address of who it's for. It will then do the rest for me. So it'll set them up as a student, it'll give them access to the course, it'll email them with details of how to access the course. And I don't know how many people are going to use it, but it's an extra value added feature to my parties. And once the system is set up, and once I've created the course, which I've already done, it really doesn't take a great deal to then give it for free to other people. And it also means if any of the friends of the people who are having a birthday want the course, well, they can come and buy it. It's up to them. I might make sales that way. Even if I make no sales, it's still a nice system for me to be able to offer a free course to people. I also have a balloon twisting course, which I mentioned earlier, and I have a balloon twisting website where I sell balloons. And so, again, it's a nice little upsell to offer people the course, maybe at a discount if they've bought balloons. That's something I hadn't thought of yet, but I can... Sorry, something I haven't implemented yet, but it's something that I could do. Everyone who buys something from the balloon twisting store could be offered this course with a discount coupon. And if I get a few sales out of that, again all the work is done, so it's passive income. So an LMS is a really really good system. A lot of people are doing sort of in house training now. I've found a system - I've got to do for going into one of my hospitals. They require me to do these courses, these online courses, which are sort of health and safety, safeguarding, fire safety, etc, etc. And they're all done online now using their version of an LMS. So you go through all the course content, you then answer some questions. If you get enough questions, right, a high enough percentage, you get a certificate. You can then present those certificates to the hospital in my case, and they'll then let me come in and volunteer to work for them. I know, right, all this work just to be able to volunteer. But LMS systems are really good and I've had a lot of experience with Sensei because I set that up a long, long time ago. But Tutor LMS is a new one for me and it's a much more modern system. And so far it's looking really good, isn't it?
[00:10:35.950] - Taylor
Yeah, I like it. It's a nice system, it works well and it's easy to use.
[00:10:40.200] - Gordon
And there are lots of different versions out there and they all sort of connect with different things. Tutor LMS will connect with WooCommerce, which then allows you to set up paid courses, but it also works with other systems that allow you to take payments as well. And there's other LMS systems. I'm trying to think of the name of probably the most famous one. I can't think what it is off the top of my head, can't remember. But there are other systems out there as well. Tutor LMS and Sensei are the only two I have experience with. That's it. I'll put the link in the show notes for this, although it may not quite be ready yet. So by the time you watch this, if it's sort of anytime after the beginning of October 2023, hopefully it'll all be up and running and ready to go and you can go and have a look. What are you going to talk about Taylor?
[00:11:33.110] - Taylor
So I've been quite busy this week. I've just been kind of getting a lot of my small tasks done, mainly.
[00:11:43.190] - Gordon
Okay.
[00:11:44.450] - Taylor
Just kind of getting the stuff that has kind of been put to the side because there's more important things that need to be done, and then also just didn't have time for. And so I'm trying to set some time aside to make sure they get done.
[00:11:59.350] - Gordon
And is it a big job doing the little jobs?
[00:12:02.080] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:12:04.070] - Gordon
They mount up, don't they?
[00:12:05.670] - Taylor
Especially because it takes time to context switch, which I think is the biggest thing is if you can, you want to context switch as little as you can because it means you lose your focus, you lose the time that it takes to figure out what you need to be doing for whatever task it is. So when you've got a bigger task, it's a lot easier because you don't context switch as much because you're focusing on one, you know dedicating your time on one issue and problem and you're kind of working towards that.
[00:12:34.920] - Gordon
And your concentration is all on that. So you don't sort of have to relearn things or remember things if you come back to it.
[00:12:41.840] - Taylor
Yeah, exactly. And something that I was thinking about for a new kind of... Some work I'm doing for a company in America is trying to send kind of so the idea was they wanted to create brands. This is kind of a bit separate, but part of what I was trying to figure out while I was doing these small odd jobs and the issue was I wanted to be able to send data to a system, so an external system. And the idea was to create a brand. Now this isn't like a brand that we know, this is the system's kind of vocabulary they've used. Essentially it's just a company and you have to submit the data to the API. Then you have to wait for a webhook response to basically say if it's been verified or not. And I was trying to figure out a way that I could have the data submitted but then not continue to the next step until I've received a webhook. And it's something that I haven't really used. I haven't really used webhooks incoming per se. So I've used things like 'Make,' 'Integromat' for using webhooks and that works fine. You just basically point the webhook location and Integromat handles everything for you and just presents you with the data to be able to manipulate. But being able to receive and subscribe to webhooks was something that I hadn't done before. And it's a really interesting idea because you can kind of send data after the fact. So obviously API responses will time out if you don't hear a response in a certain amount of time. And so the solution that I came up with was that the webhook response was going to have some sort of identification number. And so my idea was when they submit the form, I redirect them to kind of like a holding page and then I have the endpoint, the webhook subscription, to a custom rest API endpoint in WordPress. And what that will allow me to do is basically just listen for any webhook notifications. And what I can do is then I can, then when I receive a notification from the webhook, I can check the brand, I can do a search in the database for that brand ID that someone's already submitted and then I can update my form entry essentially with the submitted status, essentially.
[00:15:22.910] - Gordon
The response.
[00:15:24.250] - Taylor
And then from the front end I can just poll another endpoint and basically just keep checking to say, "what's the status of this entry?" And just check every 30 seconds or whatever. And obviously when it gets a successful response, then it can then redirect to the next step of the process. And it's something that is really interesting and I haven't really used, but it's a fun project. It's taken me a bit of time to kind of figure out what needs to be done and how to do it.
[00:15:58.720] - Gordon
Okay. Webhooks are really good because before webhooks were invented, you used to use APIs a lot and you would send an API request and then you'd basically what's called poll. So you're basically sending a request again and again and again, saying, any response? Any response? Any progress? Any progress? And that's taking up a lot of CPU time because it's a lot of effort to have to keep doing that multiple times per second or several times every minute, however long you're polling, you're doing. And so having a webhook is much better because what happens is instead of waiting and keeping asking, it tells you when it's ready. So it's equivalent to someone phoning you and saying, "right, you know, you asked me about that request, here's the response." And they're phoning you. You're picking up the phone and responding to them because you've told them the number to call. And that's what a webhook does and it's a really clever system and it stops an awful lot of internet traffic that just isn't necessary.
[00:17:09.450] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:17:10.430] - Gordon
Plus it has a lot of functionality. You can do all sorts of clever things with webhooks.
[00:17:15.300] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:17:15.880] - Gordon
So is this now finished? Have you done?
[00:17:17.930] - Taylor
No, it's something that I've now figured out how to go about the solution because it was something that I was kind of racking my brain around for a couple of days and I couldn't really make any progress because I wasn't sure what way I was supposed to go. So now it's just a matter of building that out. But the little jobs, kind of going back to what I kind of started talking about with the little jobs, allowed me to kind of think about the idea.
[00:17:47.350] - Gordon
So you were doing little jobs that didn't require too much effort to think about, and while you were doing that, you were considering the bigger issue.
[00:17:55.820] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:17:56.490] - Gordon
Okay. That's something that has always been said, isn't it? If you're struggling with something, just go and have a walk, clear your head, come back, look at it with fresh eyes, and you might find that the solution just pops into your head without trying too much. And that's effectively what you were doing, isn't it?
[00:18:19.390] - Taylor
Yeah, exactly.
[00:18:20.590] - Gordon
Good. So that's all I want to say. Have you got anything else you wish to talk about today?
[00:18:26.390] - Taylor
That's everything from me.
[00:18:28.150] - Gordon
Thank you so much for joining us. If this is the first time you've watched, then please like, share and subscribe. And even if it's not, please like, share and subscribe. We're on YouTube and on Facebook.
[00:18:39.690] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.
[00:18:44.890] - Gordon
We'll see you again next week on Friday at 1p.m. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:18:52.030] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:18:54.560] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:18:55.270] - Taylor
Bye.
