[00:00:09.160] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.600] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:10.120] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:11.980] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Thinker.
[00:00:14.140] - 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 it's sort of 14 days for this episode because we didn't have an episode last week due to the fact that I was in America, which we will come to in just a moment. Any news from you, first of all?
[00:00:36.540] - Taylor
Not from me.
[00:00:37.740] - Gordon
Okay, so let's get straight into our topics. Should I go first?
[00:00:41.740] - Taylor
Yeah, you can go.
[00:00:43.170] - Gordon
So when we had our last episode that went live, we pre-recorded that one and that's because I was in Las Vegas on the Friday that it came out. Now, the reason I went to Las Vegas is to see a friend of mine called Marc Summers. Now, we've mentioned Marc on this podcast before and he's a very good friend of mine who now lives in Texas, in a place called Austin in Texas. And he was visiting Las Vegas because there was an expo that he was exhibiting at. So I went out there to see him, spend a bit of time with him, visit the expo and basically just have a good time. And we did. We had a great time. We had another friend of Marc's that was out there that I've met before, a guy called Danny, you know Danny, who is an award winning schoolteacher and he was having his birthday while we were there. So we did lots of sort of celebrating of that, which involved a bit of alcohol. I don't actually drink a lot. It's very rare for me to drink, but when I was in Vegas, I actually drank quite a bit. So we went to see some shows. We saw a couple of Cirque du Soleil shows, "Mad Apple" and "KA," which was amazing. Just me and Marc on that one. And we went on a backstage tour for that, which was just phenomenal. I mean, the type of shows that are possible now due to computers and automation are just completely different to how they would have been many, many years ago, even ten years ago. The most sophisticated show we had at the time, sort of 10/15 years ago, actually a bit more than that would have been Starlight Express. I think that was one of the most technical shows I can think of and that was pretty technical. But then you go and see something like KA, the stage, or one of the stages, there's nine stages in this show. The proscenium is nine stories high and it has a stage that comes up, it can rotate 360 degrees, it can also rotate up. It can also go this way and this way as well as going forwards and back and it can also go up and down. And there are people on the stage at the time when it's doing this, which is just madness. You have to be so focused and to remember because it's turning this way when it's vertical you have to remember that this is up and then as it's turning you need to remember this is now up. And it's so well choreographed. But it's on at the MGM Grand. It's been there since 2005. If you get a chance to go and see the show, I highly recommend it. It is really good. I recommend you go watch it as well because I think you'll enjoy it. We also went to a brand new show which was called "Awakening" and that was at the Wind Hotel. And a friend of mine who lives out there now and works out there, different friend, guy called Tim Clovia, he builds illusions and he built a lot of the illusions that were in this new show. It opened Monday a week ago. So when I was there, on the Monday was the day it opened and we got to see it on the Wednesday, myself and Marc, and another highly technical show. It was a real spectacle. They had flooring that was... It was all in the round for a start, which was really unusual. And the flooring had sort of LED panels on it so they could light up and you know, like projection not projection, but they could show patterns and things. And the stage had three sections. A middle section that could rotate clockwise, anti-clockwise, come up and down. An outer section which could rotate clockwise, anti-clockwise, come up and down and was also split into six sections, and each of those sections could come up and down as well. And then there was an outer outer section which stayed still. It was just like a walkway going all the way around it. There were lots of puppets in the show. It was a really interesting show to watch.
[00:05:17.680] - Taylor
Sounds like you had a lot of fun.
[00:05:19.000] - Gordon
Yeah, I had a lot of fun. Had lots of really good food to eat. We went to two of Gordon Ramsey's restaurants there, Hell's Kitchen and Steak. I also went to the Eiffel Tower restaurant which is sort of halfway up the Eiffel Tower that's in Paris Hotel. And I saw a magic show as well, a guy called Pharrell Dylan, who I hadn't met before, but he was very good as well, comedy magician. And I also went to the convention centre and visited the convention that Marc was exhibiting at, and that was interesting. It was a wedding convention and Marc is exhibiting his Props2You products. All of his little signs that he does, which are really high quality. We've mentioned those on this podcast before. So one of the things I took away from my trip is how different things are over in another country. For example, Las Vegas is very different in the way that it runs and it works. It's a city that is open 24/7 for gambling, mainly. And the way that they get you to come into the casinos is they give you free drinks when you're gambling. They have the shows to entice you into the casino. And of course, the show theatres are sort of buried within the hotels, so you actually have to go through the casinos to get to the theatres. It's all been carefully thought out and it reminded me a little bit about sort of like a grocery store, a supermarket, because they do little tweaks and they move things around in their stores so that they can get the most amount of sales. So, for example, when you go into a Tesco, which is a supermarket, we have here in the UK, you see all the fresh fruit and the fresh produce and the sandwich section where you can get your meal deals and so on, and that's the first thing that you see. So you look at it and you go, "oh, okay, yeah, we could do with some fresh fruit. That would be nice. I'll grab some of that." Even if you weren't thinking of getting any. And then all of the regular stuff, like the milk and the bread and something is hidden at the back of the store, so you have to go through everything to get to it. And it's a little bit like that in Vegas, where they sort of lead you through the casinos before you get to anywhere. If you want to go to a restaurant or you want to go to a bar or you want to go to the theatre, you have to go through all the casino. You have to go past all the machines and all the people who are winning money and all the people who are losing money.
[00:08:05.580] - Taylor
And they try not to have as many straight lines either.
[00:08:09.940] - Gordon
That's true.
[00:08:10.810] - Taylor
Because otherwise it means you have to weave in and out and you have to go around all the machines.
[00:08:14.490] - Gordon
Yeah. And get enticed by the machines and the sounds they make and the bright lights. I did play roulette. I spent about $250 on roulette, but I did come away with $246. So I lost $4 in total the whole time I was there. But I got about seven drinks, which were all Baileys. So with the price of things out there, I definitely was in the lead, I was definitely winning. And Marc enjoyed his roulette as well, his favourite number being...
[00:08:47.970] - Taylor
18.
[00:08:47.970] - Gordon
18. Very good. He was also doing well with 20 and I think he was on...
[00:08:53.110] - Taylor
Anything around 18.
[00:08:53.800] - Gordon
10/12 as well. Yeah. But, yeah, it was a great trip and it was nice to get away. It was nice to have a bit of time. I took the laptop that I purchased from Taylor with me so that I could sort of keep track on what my businesses were doing. I was making sure I was checking my emails. I had my phone with me, although I made sure that my phone signal was off so that I would only be able to use it when I was in a WiFi area, which isn't hard to find. And I wouldn't be able to get calls coming through to my phone because I didn't want to be disturbed because of the time zone changes because I didn't want people ringing me at sort of what was a normal time here and 3 o'clock in the morning in Vegas. But I was more than happy to make sure I was on WiFi so that if any of my family needed to get hold of me they could contact me using FaceTime or whatever. Which gave me a bit of time to sort of step away from the business just for a short period of time, a few days basically, just to refresh the batteries, come back with renewed energy while making sure that the wheels weren't coming off by ignoring it completely. So yeah, I had a great time and there may be opportunities to go back next year and I think both of us would like to do that if that came along.
[00:10:24.330] - Taylor
Definitely.
[00:10:25.180] - Gordon
So yeah, that was my trip and that's the reason we didn't have an episode last week. So lots of learning, lots of stepping away, a little bit of relaxing and having lots of fun and eating and drinking way too much.
[00:10:38.440] - Taylor
Cool. So my topic for this week is the TAB member map. Now, TAB stands for The Admin Bar. It is a Facebook group community with 6000 plus members, all that are WordPress mainly, but more and more just based on web designers, web developers, agency owners, anything to do with kind of websites and stuff. Although predominantly focused on kind of the WordPress area. But there are people that do things in different areas.
[00:11:12.840] - Gordon
So it's just a community; it's not a product as such.
[00:11:15.640] - Taylor
No.
[00:11:15.640] - Gordon
It's just a community. What does TAB stand for?
[00:11:19.160] - Taylor
The Admin Bar. That's what it stands for.
[00:11:20.520] - Gordon
Oh so the bar, as in a bar you would go and have a drink at, not as in a bar on the top of your computer.
[00:11:27.130] - Taylor
That's where it came from originally because obviously with WordPress we have the admin bar.
[00:11:31.080] - Gordon
At the top of the website when you're editing it and viewing it. Got it.
[00:11:35.610] - Taylor
That's where it originally came from. And obviously it's got different connotations with a bar being somewhere you hang out and stuff like that. And it was set up by a guy called Kyle. He's an awesome guy, he's from Texas as well. He's over near Dallas. He's just on the outskirts, I think. And he obviously has 6000 people and there's people from all around the world. So he came up with the idea of putting all of these people on the map. So he called it TAB on the map. What he had is he had an air table and he had a form that people just put in their city, their country, and their name, whatever, so people know who it is. And it went all into this table. He then exported it as a CSV and he imported it into Google Maps studio mapping system type thing. And it worked, it worked fine.
[00:12:25.620] - Gordon
But it's a manual process, right?
[00:12:27.630] - Taylor
Yes. So every time he wanted to see an updated map, he had to export the table and re upload it.
[00:12:34.270] - Gordon
And hope something didn't break.
[00:12:35.760] - Taylor
Yeah, and something I've been working on with my personal website recently is putting markers and stuff onto a map. So, for example, my check-ins, I have a map that has all of them on there. You can click on them, it shows you data and information about the check in photos. You can click to see the actual check in itself. And so, obviously, I had literally just created and built something very similar to what might be useful for The Admin Bar. So I reached out to Kyle and said, "look, I just built this. It's pretty much copying and pasting, bar changing some things, changing where the data basically comes from. Would this be of interest?" And for me it was a way to give back to The Admin Bar community because people are very, very helpful, always looking out for you, always giving you advice and experience that they've had. So I wanted to give back to the community. So I built this for The Admin Bar. We had a lovely form where people could submit their locations. We imported all the historical data. We had a nice map which matched The Admin Bar theme, which is mainly dark theme and like a yellow accent. And then we had some stats as well. I managed to write some code to pull out the countries. So we had ordered, grouped by countries and you could see the count and the country, and also grouped by continent, so which continent has the most people, and then also when the last person was added to the map. So it automatically just took the most recent published date and obviously it would either say like "two minutes ago," "member added two minutes ago," member added an hour ago," or whatever. Which is also quite interesting because you can see it's actually been added to recently. And we've got at the time of going live, it's on about 800 and something, which is quite a lot. Obviously there's 6000 people in the Facebook group, not everybody is active, not everybody wants to share their location. But it turned out amazing. You have hundreds and hundreds of these little markers that you can zoom into. You can see... People can find people that live near them they didn't know were around in their area, making connections, which was very cool. And it was just really cool to see. One thing I did have to kind of debug halfway through was that people were submitting their location and their name twice because they would submit it and it would auto redirect to the map page, they would zoom in. "Oh, I can't see myself. Okay, I'll go back and do it. Because obviously it didn't go through." Now, what was happening is it did go through, but the issue was that they were stacking on top of each other, the markers. So people that had the exact same address. So normally people, like, if you put in New York City, New York and then obviously United States
[00:15:34.030] - Gordon
Got like a central position, isn't it?
[00:15:36.030] - Taylor
Yeah. What I was doing is, when they were submitting, I was using Google API to extract the latitude and longitude, which is what you need to map them onto the map, plot them onto the map, I guess, is probably a better word. And obviously these people were getting the exact same co-ordinates. And so they were being stacked on top of each other, they were being rendered, but you just couldn't see them because the oldest person was the person that you would see. So what I had to do is I had to write a short function basically to check to see does the current latitude and longitude is it already in the list that I've already generated. And if it is, then it takes the co-ordinates and it times's them by negative, I think it was like 0.002, to plus 0.002, so anywhere between that, which changes it by like, I don't know, a couple metres, maybe like 50 metres or something on a map, which isn't very far when you're looking at on a grand scale, but it's enough that you can see the difference, which meant...
[00:16:40.750] - Gordon
You can see there's more than one pin. So they cluster, rather than just all going on top of each other.
[00:16:44.640] - Taylor
Exactly. Which means that some people will always change. So one person will always be in that exact coordinate. And then all of the future people will all slightly get different co-ordinates every single time you open the map, because it randomly chooses a number. And it's something that obviously needed to be addressed and I actually ended up using that for my personal website as well, for the code that I wrote. And it was very useful because it meant that I could actually see how many times I'd checked into somewhere, which was quite interesting, because obviously I checked into David Lloyd's quite a lot. So I have this massive cluster of all just David Lloyd check-ins, which looks quite cool on a map, but, yeah, it was interesting. And, yeah, a lot of people loved it. I had a lot of people say thank you to me and say this is awesome. I had quite a few people mention that they are interested in something similar for their communities. So what I've done is I am going to release a tutorial and people can obviously become a member to access that tutorial.
[00:17:41.650] - Gordon
And the tutorial is on Snippets Club.
[00:17:44.260] - Taylor
Yes, it will be on Snippet Club for people to access. Obviously existing members will still get access to it and then anyone new that signs up will get access to it. And then if they want me to implement it, I can obviously charge them a fee to do that.
[00:17:57.430] - Gordon
That's really good because there are going to be people who will want to customise it in some way. Or maybe they've got... While you were talking, I was thinking it would be quite useful for me on my magic website to have a map of venues, so that if I have a client who comes to me and says, "we'd like to book you, but we haven't got a venue yet," I can send them to this page and it will show them all the venues around their area that they can then get in contact with. Which is a great idea, but I wouldn't want to have all the data that I've got with the pins stacked around or clustered. I just want the pin once, because in my situation, it's one venue, it's not how many times I've been to that venue.
[00:18:43.030] - Taylor
Of course. So it'd be all the unique venues rather than...
[00:18:45.490] - Gordon
Yes.
[00:18:45.970] - Taylor
All the accumulation.
[00:18:46.930] - Gordon
Which will also make the map cleaner as well. But that could be really useful to me. And that's a slight customization to what you currently got. But I assume this sort of information will be in the tutorial when you sign up.
[00:19:02.710] - Taylor
Yeah, I mean, I've tried to keep it, so I originally built it with ACF, which is advanced custom fields, and Fluent Forms, which is the two plug-ins of choice that I prefer. Obviously, there's Gravity Forms, which is another popular plug-in, form plug-in, and there's also Meta Box again, which is another popular custom field plug-in. So I've converted my code to work with these other plug-ins as well, just to give a bit of a broader reach for people, because I know that a lot of people have, like, gravity form lifetime deals that obviously they've had for ages and ages before Fluent Forms even existed and stuff, so they've just stuck with what they know. And again with the Meta Box licence, a lot of people didn't get the lifetime deal and so Meta Box was the next best option. And then obviously, anything over and above that, they can even customise themselves based on the code that I've kind of written, or they can obviously hire me to write something custom for them. But for the most part, it's just about getting the data in the correct format and then you just pass it to the Matte Box API and it kind of plots everything for you.
[00:20:10.480] - Gordon
That's great. It's a really good system. It looks really good as well. Is there a link that we can post in the notes so people can see what this looks like?
[00:20:18.760] - Taylor
Yes! So it's map.theadminbar.com.
[00:20:21.370] - Gordon
Okay. And anyone can go and look at that?
[00:20:23.220] - Taylor
Yep, anyone can do it. If you're not a member of The Admin Bar I wouldn't suggest you add yourself, just because it would ruin The Admin Bar members, but if you do decide actually it's something that you do want to become part of, then I highly recommend you join The Admin Bar. There's lots of great people. There's 6000 people in the Facebook group from all areas of the world, all areas of business. So there's people that run ten plus people agencies, person agencies. There's people that run one person freelancers.
[00:20:57.110] - Gordon
Yep. So, we'll put a link to the Facebook group in the show notes and we'll also put a link to Snippet Club, even though the tutorial isn't there yet. But you can still subscribe now and when it becomes available, you'll be one of the first people to get it.
[00:21:11.830] - Taylor
Yeah, so that was what I was working on this week.
[00:21:14.970] - Gordon
Yeah, very cool. It is very cool as well. I was really surprised and excited to see how it all worked. It works really well, so well done with that.
[00:21:26.470] - Taylor
Thank you.
[00:21:26.470] - Gordon
Really good. Anything else that you want to say for today?
[00:21:29.410] - Taylor
That's everything from me.
[00:21:31.180] - Gordon
So, thank you very much for joining us and apologies for not being here last week. But if you have enjoyed the episode then please like, share, and subscribe with all your friends so we can get lots more people watching this podcast and vidcast. We are available as always on Facebook and on YouTube.
[00:21:51.330] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find out about all of our past episodes and anything we may have spoken about.
[00:22:00.340] - Gordon
Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next week at 1pm on Friday, as always. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:22:08.460] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:22:11.260] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:22:11.820] - Taylor
Bye.
