[00:00:10.190] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:10.580] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:11.110] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:13.070] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:15.420] - 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. Welcome back.
[00:00:26.840] - Taylor
Welcome back.
[00:00:28.080] - Gordon
We had a week off last week. It wasn't intentional. It's just that we both got really busy because it's December. We're coming up to the end of the year. So you've got lots of end of year things. I've got lots of shows that are coming up, and I had lots over the last week as well. And that's why we didn't do a show. So I do apologise if you were looking forward to it. We normally tell you that we're not doing one, but we were so busy we didn't even manage to make an announcement on the Facebook group this week. Last week I should say. Anyway, we're back. So any news first of all?
[00:01:06.450] - Taylor
No, I don't think so.
[00:01:08.260] - Gordon
Okay. There was a few things, but they can wait 'til next week because I can't remember what they are for the moment. So let's just jump straight into our topics of the week. Taylor, would you like to go first or shall I?
[00:01:22.810] - Taylor
You can go first this week.
[00:01:24.050] - Gordon
Okay. [phone ringing] Perfect, we've got a call coming in. Here we go. They can stop. Anyway, my topic of the week is all about emails, and if you have a template of any sort, checking it in different email clients. So what do I mean by this? Well, if you've ever received an email from me, you will get your email in a nice sort of HTML wrapper. So I've created a surround, if you like. A skin, that's probably a better word, isn't it? For all of my emails. And then my content goes in the middle. The thing that I had to do though, before I was able to do that was to check that my design worked in lots of different clients. So, for example, you have Hotmail and Gmail. They are the big two for people who don't have their own email domain names. And they treat emails in very different ways. If they receive an HTML email, so that is an email with layout, with images, with colours, that sort of thing, then sometimes, especially in Gmail, it won't display the images. So it then requires the receiver to click on 'show me images.'
[00:02:53.046] - Taylor
Yep.
[00:02:53.550] - Gordon
And this means that if you've got any of your important information as an image, so it's text, but it's an image within the email, it is very highly possible that the receivers with Gmail won't receive that and be able to read it.
[00:03:13.100] - Taylor
I believe that also happens with Outlook as well. People that use Outlook.
[00:03:16.500] - Gordon
Yes. So Outlook is Hotmail, isn't it?
[00:03:19.950] - Taylor
Microsoft Office Outlook.
[00:03:22.110] - Gordon
Yeah. I think it started as Hotmail, and it became sort of Outlook, but I think a lot of people use Hotmail email addresses with it.
[00:03:30.510] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:03:30.510] - Gordon
So yes, you're right. That happens as well. And so this can be an issue. It's also worth noting at this point that the same is true if you are sending newsletters via email. So there are lots of newsletter creators. There's lots of newsletter builders and services. And most of the services, if you use one of their pre-built templates, they will already have tested those emails to make sure that they are going to work in as many different email clients as possible. There is a service called "Acid Email," and what they will do is, they have lots of email clients on lots of different platforms and devices, and you can send your email and it will then show you what that email is going to look like on all the different platforms so that you can see if there's any issues. Now, this is a paid for service. I don't believe they have a free version of it, so it's definitely a paid service. But if you're setting up a template and it's something that you're going to put into your email client and use as your main template going forward, then you could sign up for a short period of time; test your emails, make sure they all work; tweak them if not; send them again; test them again until you've got it right, and then cancel the service, knowing that your emails have been 'acid tested' if you like.
[00:05:05.560] - Taylor
For the moment, cos obviously they can change and things can break further down the line.
[00:05:11.310] - Gordon
Yeah. And if you're sending lots of emails and you're sending lots of newsletters, it's probably worth keeping this service so that you can test them all before you send them out, just to make sure that nothing's changed. And of course, we have new things that come along with CSS. New things that come along with HTML. Things are deprecated, functions that were working no longer work, etc etc. So it's always a good idea to periodically test these emails in a service like Acid Email just to see what your customers are receiving. Because it's really important, if something that's really important, like, for example, you've got a 'buy' button, which is a link to somewhere, doesn't show on a particular series of devices or series of email clients, people are just not going to be able to buy anything from you. They're not going to be able to click on any links, which will then take them to the information that you want them to go to. So this is really important. Can you think of any other?
[00:06:14.730] - Taylor
Well, there's one thing that people kind of sometimes get, even myself, that get confused over, that a 'browser client' and an 'email client' are two completely separate things. They don't have the same capabilities and compatibilities. A lot of the newer CSS features that get released, and even just kind of what we would call standard or basic functionality of a web page don't work in email clients, and so you'll find that if you were to inspect a lot of the emails that you receive is they're all made up of tables. Which is probably when you were building websites initially is how you built them, you built them all up in tables.
[00:06:56.510] - Gordon
That's right.
[00:06:57.240] - Taylor
And it's still done that way because you've got legacy email clients that still use that. Some of the newer ones will have better capabilities, the ones that, Gmail maybe, that if they're web based, so you use their web, they probably would be able to render them. But other platforms probably wouldn't be able to because they're not fully browser based. And so that's something to take into consideration as well if you're having someone build you a custom email signature, or if you're building it yourself is, like you said about testing, is a lot of these normal basic functions that we would be used to, just don't work.
[00:07:37.210] - Gordon
Yeah. And that's a good point you made about viewing emails on a web browser. If you've got "Webmail," for example, then your emails might look different in the Webmail to how they look on your email client. If you're using "Mac Mail" or you're using "Outlook" on a PC or, whatever your email client is, if you're just using it on a mobile. Again, mobile. Are your emails mobile responsive? Are they going to look fine on a mobile as well as on a computer?
[00:08:11.030] - Taylor
Yeah. I mean, a long time ago before mobile responsiveness was a thing, you used to have to pinch and Zoom in to websites because they just didn't have that functionality to scale down. And again with tables it's very easy for that to happen where things go outside of the browser or the device width. And you have the same kind of functionality where you're scrolling left and right by accident, you've got to pinch and Zoom to read it.
[00:08:39.130] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:08:39.130] - Taylor
And that's not obviously user experience or good for the user experience. If you were to receive that from Amazon, or any other top tier company, you would probably unsubscribe and probably not want to use their services because you think "come on, get your stuff together."
[00:08:55.990] - Gordon
And that's true also of any transactional emails you send. So if somebody has purchased something from you and you send them like an invoice email, does your invoice email actually have all the information visible to the customer when they receive the email? That's another thing you need to test. So basically, same as you would on a website; view it in lots of different browsers. Do the same with your emails for clients, but also web browsers, Webmail. Check it on as many different devices as you can. If you have friends, send your emails to those friends and say, "can you do a screenshot and send it back to me so I can see what it looks like." And then you also have these services Acid Email, and I'm sure there's others, but that's the big one that I know about. So there you go. That's my topic. What are you going to talk about today, Taylor?
[00:09:51.350] - Taylor
So this week I came across a new tool that I found.
[00:09:57.250] - Gordon
Oh, nice.
[00:09:58.020] - Taylor
So it's called "OneSimpleAPI" and what it allows you to do, it's a no code, API driven first, tool. So they have lots of built in functionalities that you can make use of in your own applications or integrations. So if you've ever had it so something's been taken a screenshot of, and you say, "take a screenshot of this page." That is one of, an example. So what happens is...
[00:10:25.150] - Gordon
A web page, this is.
[00:10:26.670] - Taylor
Yeah, so they will load up a digital, a virtual browser, take a screenshot and then convert that to an image. If you want to calculate the difference between pounds and dollars, for example, have a conversion, you would normally either have to find an API that does something like this. And there's lots and lots of different APIs out there that can do this but obviously they're all individual costs. Or you may want to create a QR code, which obviously can hold a certain number of data in it. And then you scan it with a phone or any sort of camera, and it will tell you what that is, whether it be a URL, whether it be an email address or just a message. There are lots of different things you can do. OneSimpleAPI kind of groups them all together into one application that you can then hit different endpoints and get different information. So I wanted to try it out and see what I could do and what was possible. And for a long time I've wanted to try and create my own event ticketing system or website without the use of pre-built plug-ins that give you limited control over how things look, how things work. So the premise of the idea was you have all your events and you have a form. People can then fill in the form; so their name, email address, and people who are attending. You click book and it sends you an email, and it gives you a link to a QR code. If you've ever been to any sort of event where there's a mass event, so any sort of football, sports games, any sort of concerts, festivals, they will normally scan a ticket or even theatres. They'll normally scan your ticket, sometimes a barcode, sometimes QR code. And what they do is they then want to validate and check that that is a real ticket. And I wanted to kind of do the same thing. So I found a QR scanner which uses your camera, so whether it be your phone or your laptop, and it's able to return whatever is in that QR code.
[00:12:42.300] - Gordon
Let me just make this clear. A QR scanner is not like a handheld gun that you get in supermarkets. It's software. Yes?
[00:12:50.840] - Taylor
Well, it just uses your camera, and it can then detect a QR code in the frame.
[00:12:57.080] - Gordon
So it could run on a mobile device which has a camera attached.
[00:12:59.400] - Taylor
Yeah, anything that really has a camera really, so a laptop with a webcam or your phone with the back camera, and it would scan, it would just tell you what it is. It doesn't do anything more than that. However, if you integrate that with, once you've scanned it, you make a database check to say, "get me any ticket or form submissions that have this specific code." And the code that I generated is a random string of eleven characters I believe it was, yeah eleven characters, be it numbers, letters, and the algorithm I found said that after 35 million runs, so they ran this same function 35 million times, they didn't get one duplicate. So I'm quite confident that it's...
[00:13:49.600] - Gordon
It'll be fine, yeah.
[00:13:50.540] - Taylor
And if you've got more than one event, you can always prefix your event with the name of the event onto the front of your random strings. That gives it even more kind of uniqueness. So yeah, you make a request to your database and if it returns something it says, "yes, this is a valid ticket. Here is the data of the person." So, "this is their first name. This is their email. And these are the people that are attending." However, if it is not something that's in the database, so it's just a QR code that is a link to YouTube or it's a link to someone else's website, it would say, "sorry, access denied," or "ticket denied," because it just doesn't recognise it, and it's not a ticket from the company.
[00:14:36.520] - Gordon
And if somebody tries to spoof their own QR code, having seen the format, then it'll actually check the database to make sure that it exists, that that random string exists, rather than just any random string.
[00:14:50.530] - Taylor
Yes, exactly.
[00:14:51.200] - Gordon
So it's very secure.
[00:14:52.560] - Taylor
And then the last thing is, you get through, you get your scan ticket, and then you slide your phone to your friend and they try and use the same QR code so you can save and use the same code twice. Sadly, it will not let you. I make sure that when a QR code is scanned, it updates that form submission or ticket to say that it's been scanned. The status turns to 'true,' so it's been scanned. So this means that you can scan it one more time, ten times, 50 times, and it will give you the same error every single time telling you the ticket has already been used and you cannot use it again.
[00:15:30.570] - Gordon
Very good.
[00:15:31.950] - Taylor
So it's a very very basic premise of what could be a big event ticketing system. Now, the reason for building it was purely out of curiosity and also my ability and seeing if it was something that would be possible. I've had people reach out to me and ask, can I integrate it for their own system? People asking for tutorials and things like that, which I may do in the future, but it was more just trying to see, is it possible? Could it be done? And obviously I can do whatever I want with that information, have a client that needs it, or again, if people would like me to integrate it to their system. And so I bought my own kind of credits I guess. So I get a certain number of credits a month with the OneSimpleAPI, which is the tool that is...
[00:16:23.780] - Gordon
It's the service.
[00:16:24.110] - Taylor
Yeah, it's the service that is generating the QR codes for me. So I make a request saying, "this is what I want my message to be, here's my API key, generate me an image." It will then save it to Amazon's Storage, and I can then use that wherever I want, so I can embed it in a page; I can bed it in an email; or link it in the email. And that is what's doing the heavy lifting of the QR generation. Now the person that built it, I reached out to them and they have kindly offered to sponsor the demo. So because it's a free and it's a public website, I didn't want to use my own credits because obviously I've got my own plans for my own projects and commercial stuff. So I said, "would you be interested in sponsoring it?
[00:17:12.520] - Taylor
I can give you a link on the website to your website. I've got a big audience of people that I'm sharing it with." And also just so that I don't have to use up my credits. And he said "yes." So we've got...
[00:17:27.720] - Gordon
So thank you to him.
[00:17:29.040] - Taylor
Yeah, I will send you a link, the developer of OneSimpleAPI so you can have a look. If you want to share it on social media, feel free. And yeah, thank you very much if you are watching.
[00:17:41.520] - Gordon
So this is a proof of concept that you created a working system for.
[00:17:46.680] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:17:46.680] - Gordon
Obviously it's for a ticket that doesn't actually do anything.
[00:17:50.880] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:17:51.380] - Gordon
So if any of our listeners or viewers want to try it out for themself, how do they get to it?
[00:17:57.600] - Taylor
So you can go to scanner.tdrayson.com. We'll have a link in the show notes. Tdrayson.com is my kind of personal domain that I just like to chuck any projects on that I have under a subdomain. And if you check out my website, you can see all different projects that I've worked on or built. So you've got my company; This Week With; Oxybuild Challenge, which was the generator. A couple of smaller projects, so I've got a random kind of idea generator for websites. I've got lots of stuff on there that you can check out and have a look, and you might find one that you quite like.
[00:18:45.120] - Gordon
Yeah. So that's very good. The best way to use the demo is to create yourself a QR code by buying a ticket and then on a different device which has a camera go and use the scanner. And then you can scan the code that's been sent to you by email. So make sure you put a proper email address in, otherwise you won't receive the email with the QR code link. The other thing we have to say here is that none of this data is kept for any period of time, it's like seven days or something, and then everything's deleted.
[00:19:19.530] - Taylor
So, after seven days, we delete all the entries. Well for each entry, after seven days, it will be deleted. So depending on when you signed up, it will be seven days from that point. And that's just so we don't keep your data. I keep the database clean, and also your data that's not getting stored or anything.
[00:19:38.080] - Gordon
Yeah, exactly. More important, nothing is happening with the information that you put into this system, which is very important these days. It's a great system. I've seen it working, and it's really good. If you have any thoughts as to what it might do for you, then leave your comments below or even better, get in touch with The Creative Tinker, and they can talk with you about integrating it into your website.
[00:20:06.070] - Taylor
Yeah, that's pretty much it really.
[00:20:08.150] - Gordon
Fantastic. Well, thank you very much for joining us. As always, we can be found on Facebook and on YouTube. Please like, share and subscribe.
[00:20:17.670] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk, to find all of our past episodes and links to anything we've spoken about.
[00:20:25.750] - Gordon
So until next week, we'll see you at 1pm next Friday. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you again. Take care. Goodbye.
[00:20:33.820] - Taylor
My name's Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:20:36.830] - Gordon
Ah, and my name's Gordon from Drayson Design. Goodbye.
[00:20:59.990] - Taylor
Bye.
