[00:00:11.390] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:11.780] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:13.410] - Gordon
My name's Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:00:15.800] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:19.050] - 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 as self employed business owners. Welcome back.
[00:00:33.210] - Taylor
Welcome back.
[00:00:33.210] - Gordon
You can see that we are in different locations again. So we're doing it over Zoom, and hopefully it should work. The technology should work. Well, I hope it will work anyway.
[00:00:48.530] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:00:49.320] - Gordon
It's been a bit of a strange couple of weeks for us, actually, because we are just so busy doing all sorts of things at the moment. And as you can see, Taylor is out and about, and he's not got very good lighting going on there, so hopefully you can see him okay. But he's got lots of marble behind him. Where abouts are you Taylor?
[00:01:14.440] - Taylor
I am in my girlfriend's kitchen. They recently had it redone. As you can see, the marble and the new kind of kitchen looks really nice.
[00:01:27.610] - Gordon
Lovely, yes. So just to let everyone know I've got a camera up here, which I'm looking into. But to see Taylor, I have to look down at my screen. So if it looks like I'm not looking at you, I'm looking at Taylor. So instead of doing this or this, whichever side he is, I don't know. It's always different, isn't it?
[00:01:46.440] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:01:46.960] - Gordon
I'm actually just looking down. So we are nearly at Christmas.
[00:01:53.410] - Taylor
We are.
[00:01:53.410] - Gordon
And that means that we are coming to the end of season two very shortly, because when we get to January, season three will begin. So it's an exciting time.
[00:02:05.440] - Taylor
This is our second Christmas with the podcast, so it's very exciting.
[00:02:10.410] - Gordon
Yes, it is. And I think we'll probably end up doing something similar to what we did last year, which was just a sort of a quick Happy Christmas very short episode for next week, just because it's manic...
[00:02:28.450] - Taylor
It is.
[00:02:28.450] - Gordon
At this time of year. In fact, I've got the potential of a delivery coming while I'm here. Someone else in the house, so hopefully they'll be able to get it if the delivery does come. And the telephone might go, we've got lots of potential distractions that are going to happen during this show. Hopefully they won't, but that is a possibility. So any news, Taylor?
[00:02:56.110] - Taylor
Nothing from me this week.
[00:02:59.350] - Gordon
Okay. I've got a little bit of news. So Amazon's Web Services, or AWS for short, powers a lot of websites and services on the internet. And during the week it went down, not just once, but twice.
[00:03:16.400] - Taylor
That's not good.
[00:03:18.370] - Gordon
It's not good, no. The first time it went down, it actually locked out all the engineers as well, so they couldn't get back into it to fix it. But the second time, they managed to fix it reasonably quickly. But I think it's because of the same issue. So hopefully they've figured out what that is now and they've got it fixed. But it does mean that some of the biggest services on the internet went down because they're using AWS as their server of choice, which is a good choice, actually, it's a good service.
[00:03:52.270] - Taylor
It kind of goes to show that you need to have redundancy in place and you need to do fail safe checks regularly, whatever type of business you've got, because like you said, the engineers were locked out and I'm guessing they had some sort of backup solution that they can do to like bypass or get in.
[00:04:11.660] - Gordon
Well, I believe they had to go into the actual server centres to actually physically sort out the servers. They couldn't do it remotely, because they got locked out.
[00:04:20.760] - Taylor
But you know, if they have that issue, you need to make sure that you have got something that you can access as a last resort measure. A lot of apps that you probably use on a day to day basis have some sort of backup code. So they'll say, "keep these safe" and that's for if you ever get locked out of your own account and not from your own fault, you just forget the password or too many errors, too many login attempts. You need to have these kind of backups in place and fail safes essentially.
[00:04:51.950] - Gordon
That's exactly right. And Amazon are normally very good at this sort of thing. One of the things that got locked out were their delivery drivers. The delivery drivers, I think in America, rather than over here, were unable to log in and see where parcels had to be delivered, or when they had delivered parcels they were unable to then notify Amazon that the delivery had taken place, which is Amazon's core business. So, yeah, lessons learned I think.
[00:05:22.790] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:05:22.790] - Gordon
So, would you like to go first today, or shall I Taylor?
[00:05:26.660] - Taylor
I'll go first this week.
[00:05:28.490] - Gordon
Okay.
[00:05:29.370] - Taylor
So, this week, well, for the past maybe two weeks, I have, I impulsively bought a domain name. It's very very common for us developers to buy domain names, and this one was called 'Oxychangelog.' A big shout out to one of my friends in the Divi community. He built a website called 'Divichangelog,' which is where the kind of idea originally came from. So Divi have a changelog.txt file, so a text file, on their server that they update every time there's a new update. Now, Oxygen just don't have the change log in their plugin, and they create a blog post every time there's a new change log, so there isn't a real easy way to either search, look back on, or find, any information relevant to the change log, the previous change logs. I think it was version two of Oxygen, they completely rebuilt the entire system and you had to either rebuild your entire sites, or leave it on Oxygen one and start building new sites on Oxygen two. So this means Oxygen actually have an old site called "Oxygen App," and that has their past change logs on as well. So if you're trying to find version one's change log on the new site, it just doesn't exist because it's on the old site. So what me and my good friend Pedro did is we decided to go through every single blog post which had like change logs, download or copy the information in the change log: the introductions; which version number it was; the type of update it was. So they've obviously got the Oxygen, which is the main one, they've got the WooCommerce integration, and they've got the Gutenberg integration, all of separate plug-ins. And the videos, and the links to the actual blog post itself on Oxygen's website. And kind of the idea is it will allow people to be able to easily search for what happened or when something was released in an easy to find and digestible way. And also sending people updates, because at the moment, Oxygen only add new releases and kind of betas and release candidates or Alphas, on the Facebook group. So people that just don't like using Facebook because they just don't use it themselves, that's the only way they're able to find out if there's any release. I believe they do send out emails for full stable releases, but not for the other types. And so we wanted to have a way that when we create a new post, it automatically sends an email to anyone that is subscribed to the list to just say "here, look there's a new release, check it out." They can obviously go to the original blog post where they post about it, but also it just means that if they need to, they can search. And it's quite useful because a lot of keywords are used in some of the change logs that just aren't easily able to be found on the main Oxygen site. So it was a bit of fun, an idea that I thought would be useful to a lot of developers and users of Oxygen. And I'm also hoping to create an API rest endpoint. So that for example, if you run an Oxygen blog you can have on your website a, you can pull in and say, "show me the latest kind of Oxygen release," and it will automatically update based on that end point, which is obviously just going to be the latest post on our website. So it could be quite nice because it means that people are able to have that on there. They don't have to update it manually because it's pulling from our data, which already exists. So yeah, I hope there's going to be a lot of use out of it and just helping again the community. I love doing community open source projects because I learn a lot from it, I get to collaborate with kind of friends that have similar interests and you just get to try stuff and see what works, what doesn't, that you can obviously then take into your own client projects.
[00:09:46.770] - Gordon
And it looks really good as well. I've seen it and the user interface and user experience is very good on it. That was Pedro was it, who did that?
[00:09:57.490] - Taylor
Yeah. So similar to how I did the Oxybuild Challenge with Luke, Pedro did all of the designs and kind of hard coded everything, and then I went in and connected everything up; dynamically connected things, created functions to make sure that things connected properly and show appropriately. But we also wanted it to be a bit more than just a change log, because that's kind of just duplicating content, essentially, of what we're doing. However, we wanted it to be in a nicer, easy to understand, but also just a helpful website. So some of the other stuff that we have is a list. So we are going to be using Ninja Tables, which just has a massive list, in a table, and one row for each entry, which say you don't want to see the kind of nicer layer, and you just want to go straight to the one you want, you can find it a lot quicker there, or you can see them in just a different format, essentially. But we also want to use, create a timeline. So it's really interesting to see the differences in time between different releases. So an alpha to a beta, but an alpha to a stable, you could see the difference just based on the distance between the releases. So we wanted to just add more than just a copy of all of the text from Oxygen's website. And the last thing is we have a statistics page, where you can compare different things so you could see, I don't know, how many releases for the different types of plug-ins; so you've got Oxygen, WooCommerce and Gutenburg, but also the types of releases. So how many alphas, betas, release candidates, and stable releases have there been? And you can see them in nice charts and things like that. And just, again, just have a nice way for people to be able to look back and see how far Oxygen's come. Again, I love data, not because I think it's useful, I just find it really interesting in ways that you can display. You know, if you've seen my personal website, which is still in development, you'll see a lot of my site is just based on data, and it's purely there because I can. I can collect that data and I can present it in whatever way I want. So yeah, we just try to come up with nice ideas that, again, just testing our skills, seeing what we can come up with, and just having fun at the end of the day. You know, it's nice to come away from client work to work on these personal projects, and I think it's what helps you keep the fire inside of you for doing something you enjoy. If you do too much just client work, that isn't your own, you get to a point where you just stop enjoying it. And so I kind of make sure that I've always got something on the go or a couple of things on the go.
[00:12:52.450] - Gordon
And what would be really funny is if Oxygen end up using your API to show their latest change log item on their website, that would be quite fun, wouldn't it?
[00:13:06.150] - Taylor
Yeah. So they have, in the top left of their website, they have a kind of just like a latest something, whether that be a blog post, whether that be the latest release. But I think at the moment it is a manual thing that they just update once they release a new post. So depending on if it helps them and saves them time, they may want to use our end point.
[00:13:33.850] - Gordon
So in fact, they could end up using the time that they would have spent doing the change log, working on Oxygen. So you're basically speeding up the process of Oxygen updates as well, which is quite nice. The other thing with change logs is, there's going to be a lot of people who are going to listen to this and go, "Well, why is it important to see a change log? Something's been updated, something's been fixed. That's fine. Why do I need to know about it?" Well, it's a great place to look to find new functionality. We have a hosting company that send out newsletters, and it's something that we both enjoy reading because we can find out what's new, what we can offer our customers, what new functionality we now have available to us. And it's the same with most change logs in most software. And it's the sort of thing where before change logs became a big thing, I used to run a particular bit of software, and I thought it would be a great idea if the software did something. So I emailed the developer and I said, "Wouldn't it be great if the software did this?" And they came back and said, "Well, yeah, it's been able to do that for the last year." And I had no idea, because when I signed up to the service, it had a set number of features, and they added all these other features that I didn't know anything about. So change logs are actually one of the few things I do enjoy reading and looking at, so that I can be on top of what's happening. Because the only way that a software or service is going to be of use to you is if you can make the most of it. And the only way you will be able to do that is if you know what it can do.
[00:15:21.200] - Taylor
Yeah. I mean, you know, say you joined a company, in terms of you bought the product, and you think, "oh, that'd be a cool idea." You may not know that it's already been implemented because sometimes they don't update their feature list on their sales page. But you just, sometimes...
[00:15:41.390] - Gordon
The other thing is you don't often go and look at the sales page once you've already bought it. That's the other thing.
[00:15:47.770] - Taylor
Yeah. But if they update their features on the sales page with new things that they've built and added, that would help because people go, "oh that's been implemented." But sometimes you just don't know that. I found a couple of things actually just from building this site that I'm like, "oh, I didn't actually know that Oxygen had that built in." And I'd been writing my own custom functions for it because I didn't know that it existed. So it's good to be able to look back at or even search previous to when you joined, to see "does this thing that I'm looking for exist?"
[00:16:20.210] - Gordon
Yeah it's great.
[00:16:20.210] - Taylor
But also, it's a nice place to reference. Again, if you have people that go, "does this exist in the Facebook group?" You can say, "it does. Here's the link to the change log when it was added." And you can obviously go read up more about it if you need to. You can go to the main Oxygen site. And yeah, there are tonnes and tonnes of different use cases for it. And just keeping a change log I think is really important. It's something that Oxygen didn't do from the start in terms of their plug-in. So when you look at the plug-in inside of the plug-in dashboard, if you click 'View details,' it just doesn't show a change log or anything like that that most plug-ins do. And it's because they haven't done that from the beginning that they just can't really do that going forward, otherwise they'd end up kind of breaking everybody's site with an update that would require everybody to go update it by manually adding it. And some people have hundreds of sites that they manage, so it's just not something you can do. So the way that they've done it now is their only real way without breaking everything again, which they did between version one and version two.
[00:17:27.110] - Gordon
And the other thing is, now you've got this plus Oxy Challenge. There is the possibility in the future to monetize the site by advertising sort of Oxygen plug-ins and add-ons, and that sort of thing. Once the sites are starting to get a certain amount of traffic, it would then become very interesting to advertisers.
[00:17:50.810] - Taylor
Yeah, 100%. If people want to push their plug-in that they've just released, it would be a nice place for people to kind of advertise them, because like you said, people are going there, they're going to be Oxygen users mainly, so they're pretty much your target audience. It's like using Google ads and targeting people searching for specific keywords. You're being put in front of your target audience, pretty much the only people that you're interested in. So there's lots of ideas and lots of things that can be done.
[00:18:21.470] - Gordon
Very nice. Anything else you want to say on that?
[00:18:24.460] - Taylor
No, I think that's everything from me.
[00:18:27.650] - Gordon
So my topic is 'strange season, strange shows.' So it's the Christmas period for me. And as far as magic goes, things are very very unusual. So most of the year, not including July, I'll come back to July. But most of the year I do sort of birthday parties or I do sort of a 1 hour magic show for children, or I'll do close up for adults, and it will be a couple of hours, or it will be a wedding or something. And they all sort of fit into a sort of a criteria or a category. Christmas, and July, everything changes because I end up doing shows that I don't normally do. So for a start, I'm doing Christmas shows. So it's a Christmas themed show, which is tricky in some respects, because there are some places that I go to every year, and in fact, the one that I did this morning, Sunningdale preschool, I've been going to them now for, oh I had it on my sheet, eleven years? No, it must be more than that.
[00:19:52.990] - Taylor
It's a long time.
[00:19:52.990] - Gordon
It's my 33rd show with them. And so I see the people who run the place, a lot. I go twice a year, in fact. And the kids I see maybe two or four times depending on if they see all the shows that I do. So I need to make sure that the shows are different in some way, so they don't get to see the same thing every time I go, because otherwise it wouldn't be as entertaining for them because they know what's coming.
[00:20:26.270] - Taylor
But not too different.
[00:20:26.270] - Gordon
So when you come to...
[00:20:27.960] - Taylor
But not too different.
[00:20:28.848] - Gordon
Sorry?
[00:20:28.920] - Taylor
I said, but not too different, that it would take you hours and hours to rebuild an entirely different and new show.
[00:20:35.810] - Gordon
So that's the point. At Christmas, I do a Christmas show. Now, my Christmas show is my normal show, but it has a Christmas effect in it. And the reason I do that is because my normal show has been honed until it's really, really slick and I know it inside out, and I can perform it pretty much without thinking, which gives me the opportunity to then make it entertaining for that group of people who are watching, so it can be personalised to them without me having to think too hard about what I'm doing. But if I was to have a completely new show at Christmas, it's not going to be anywhere near as slick as my normal show is because I would only be doing it at Christmas. So the first few shows during my Christmas season would be okay. Then it will get to the point when it's starting to bed in and it's starting to get good, and by the time it's just about the end of the Christmas season, it's really good. And then I stop and I won't be doing that show, or a Christmas show, for at least a year. And probably not those effects for another four or five years, because I need to change my Christmas shows for the regular shows that I do. So it's a really weird time for me. And then earlier in this week, I did a Guide and Ranger show. So we are talking about about sort of 35, ten to 17 year old girls.
[00:22:13.230] - Taylor
It's a big age gap.
[00:22:15.290] - Gordon
It's a big age gap, but it's also girls, and it's also... You know the difference between an all girl audience and an all boy audience for that age range is very very different. In fact, the girls are a nicer audience to perform for. The boys are a lot more loud and brash and shouty, and they want to try and impress their mates by saying they know what's going on and stuff, which girls don't tend to do. So I was looking forward to the show, but it has to be for that age group, it has to be a young adult show because they're not children. They're not six, seven, eight year olds, but they're not sort of 18, 20, 22 year olds. They're right in that middle gap. And so the show has to be a sort of a hybrid between my children's show and the show I would perform for an all adult audience. When I say all adult, I'm not talking about adult humour. I'm just talking about the sort of material and the presentation that I would use when I'm performing for them. And so it's just that, it's a hybrid, it's a mixture of the two. So for example, I did some of the effects that I would do for adults to begin with. One of my openers, which is something that I really enjoy doing, is stamping my foot on the ground a couple of times as if I've got something stuck in my shoe, and then as I take my shoe off, I then take out of it a full can of Coke, put my shoe back on, open the Coke and drink. And it's a regular can of Coke, I could give it away. It's a really nice opener, but it's not something I would do for children. It's something I would do for an adult show, and it fitted in perfectly with this show. And the finish to this show was the production of my bunny rabbit, which again, I don't do for an adult show, that's normally for my children's show. So it's a mixture of this trick that I do for adults; this trick I do for children, but done in a slightly different way maybe, because they're not young children, they're older children; and then this one again that I would do normally for an adult audience. And every show I do at Christmas has to be thought about very carefully to make sure it's suitable for the audience. A show I did this morning was for two to four year olds, now I don't normally perform for two year olds, three years and up is normally what I recommend, because two year olds just don't have the concentration to sit and watch a 45 minute show. Their sort of concentration will lapse and they'll want to go off and do something else. But this is a nursery, and a nursery will be preschool, which is sort of two to four years of age, and so if I'm going to do that sort of show, it needs to be a show that will be suitable for that age group. And so again, I'm finding that I'm doing things that I would do for my three and four year old show, but I'm changing the way I do it ever so slightly so it will be of interest to the two year olds, and hopefully keep their attention. So it's a really odd time of year for me, and I've done it enough times now to have sort of a lot of experience in it, so I can very quickly sum up what the situation is when I get to a show and say, "right, okay, I know what I'm going to do for this audience." But it means that my car is much fuller than it normally is because I'm taking extra things with me that may or may not be used. I might take something that I think might work, and then when I get there, realise that the situation, or the space that I've got, or the audience, or the size of the room, or whatever, it won't allow me to do that. And so therefore I have to change what I was going to do to something different. So I have to make sure I have all these things in the car with me just in case, and they may be not used. They may end up getting taken out of the car at the end of the Christmas season and they haven't actually been used, but they've been there the whole time. And the other thing with the shows that I've got at the moment is that I do a lot of shows during the week, weekdays, so it's sort of school shows, nursery shows, preschools, a lot of those type shows, end of term shows. But then also you get Cubs, Brownies, Scouts, etc, etc. So I'm going out a lot on the weekdays for those types of shows, and then the weekends are a lot quieter. For example, last Sunday I had the day off, which is just as well because I had Pantomime rehearsal in the afternoon, but it's very rare for me to have a weekend day without any shows in because they are normally my prime spots, and then at Christmas and again in July because again, end of term, everything sort of switches over and I end up having days at the weekend which are very quiet or empty. In fact, my weekend coming up tomorrow, I don't have any shows. I have nothing on Saturday, nothing on Sunday. And I suspect that's because it's the sort of nearest full weekend before Christmas. And I think that's got a lot to do with it. People are already busy doing things. If they're going to have parties, they probably had the parties already or they're just getting ready for Christmas Day and the celebrations they're going to have with friends and family there. And birthdays, I still do birthdays in December, birthday parties. Which again, are very odd because I'm not doing a Christmas show. So I'm doing a birthday show during my Christmas season. So it's a very strange time for me. And I'm sure there are lots of other magicians and entertainers who are in a similar situation. And I'm getting up very early to do morning shows. This morning's one was sort of a 10 o'clock show, but I had a two hour drive to get to it, which meant leaving the house at sort of half past seven. And you know, I don't normally, I'm not normally up at that time, if I'm honest. Unless it's a show that I'm doing at the weekend, which is a long way, which I try not to do because I try and keep them close together to make sure I can get from one show to the next show. But there's a lot more distance involved at Christmas, and a lot more different situations. And in fact, some of the shows that I do every year I'm not doing this year because of Covid. You know, there's cancellations that have happened because of the new restrictions that have come in and people not feeling as confident in sort of party situations. So that's another difference for this year, which I haven't had in past years. So, the life of an entertainer huh?
[00:29:43.390] - Taylor
Very varied, and interesting.
[00:29:44.440] - Gordon
So that's it. It is, and that's possibly why I enjoy it so much, because no two days are alike. It's never the same old, same old. I just don't get that, it's always something different every day.
[00:30:00.740] - Taylor
That kind of goes back to what I was talking about earlier about the fact that I do these personal projects to just keep it interesting and make sure it's not the same because otherwise it could be a very boring time that you have because every day is the same. It'd be Groundhog day, and you quickly get bored of that.
[00:30:23.690] - Gordon
Yeah. And I think, in fact, doing different things every day, keeps your interest in what you're doing and stops you getting bored, because I got a lovely email the other day from a lady who said that she was really pleased with everything I did. And when she turned up at the venue and I was there, she remembers thinking, "Gordon's here, everything's going to be fine." And she says, "you obviously have an awful lot of experience." And she said, "quite often when you get a lot of experience with someone, they also have a clinical approach to it, where it's sort of a little bit more robotic and you're just going through the motions." But she said, "that wasn't the case with you. You were very personable. You made it very exciting. You made my daughter feel incredibly special on her birthday." And it's because every show is different that I think that is the case. I think if every show was the same, if I was doing, for example, a West End show and it was a play and the show is the same every single performance I can very quickly see myself getting bored of doing the same old thing, and it becoming a bit of a trudge, a chore.
[00:31:41.810] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:31:43.070] - Gordon
I mean, I don't know. I mean, being in the West End doing a show, I might feel very different, and privileged, and you know, that might be the thing that keeps the adrenaline going and keeping it fresh. But yeah, I prefer what I'm doing I think.
[00:32:00.230] - Taylor
Everybody's different.
[00:32:01.690] - Gordon
And the fact that I can actually change things up.
[00:32:02.250] - Taylor
Everyone enjoys different things. If your life goal is to be on the West End, then I think it'd be completely different because you would find the difference and change within each show, the backstage community and family that you build with the cast members; you're going to be able to change things up, have fun and stuff like that. So I think, yeah, like you said, it all depends on what brings you the most enjoyment and you'll end up doing the best job you can.
[00:32:31.550] - Gordon
And I also think if you're doing a West End show, then it's just going to get better and better and better as you get better at what you're doing, and all the cast around you...
[00:32:40.640] - Taylor
Become more confident.
[00:32:42.330] - Gordon
Are getting better. And then it will get to a point when your contract is up and then you get to decide whether you want to continue doing it, or maybe go on and do another show. And at that point, you've got something brand new, a new project to start, and the whole process starts again where you start building up your character and getting the show to be better, and better and better. Exactly the same. And that's what I'm doing with Pantomime at the moment, it's a brand new project for me. I say brand new. We've been doing it for a couple of months now, and I've been writing it over the last year, so it's not that new a project. But we're getting to the point when in January, we get to perform it in front of an audience, fingers crossed that we're allowed to. And then every single day that we perform it, the show's just going to get better and better and better. It's going to come on in leaps and bounds over the rehearsal, because the rehearsal is sort of same old, same old. We are adding little bits to it, but it's learning the lines, learning the movements, learning the songs, and only when you've got all of that, can you then just improve on it and get better and better. So for me, that's the bit that's yet to come.
[00:33:58.780] - Taylor
Definitely.
[00:33:59.470] - Gordon
And we'll talk about Pantomime again in January because I'll be sort of right in the middle of it at that point, and I'm sure there'll be lots to talk about.
[00:34:09.510] - Taylor
Yeah. Wonderful.
[00:34:12.250] - Gordon
So that's it from me today.
[00:34:13.810] - Taylor
Same from me.
[00:34:16.010] - Gordon
Slightly longer show than we normally have, so I hope you found it interesting. As always, we can be found on YouTube and on Facebook. Please like, share and subscribe.
[00:34:26.250] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk, to find all of our past episodes and search for any topics we may have spoken about.
[00:34:34.970] - Gordon
So thank you for joining us. We will be back next week, I hope. And that will be our Christmas message to you, so it will be a short one to make up for this long one. So that's next week on the Friday at 1pm. Until then, thank you for watching. My name's Gordon, I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:34:53.650] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:34:57.830] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:34:58.540] - Taylor
Bye.
