[00:00:10.240] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:10.660] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:11.080] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:12.910] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:14.830] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week with Taylor and Gordon," a weekly vidcast and podcast where we talk about things that have affected our business in the last seven days. So welcome back. Thank you for joining us. It's been a busy week as always. My hair is starting to get really long. I know it's been long for a while, but it's getting to the point now when it's not actually brushing flat. I'm starting to go curly. You've gone a, well, you've gone curly ages ago. It's really, really curly for you. But anyway, back to you guys. We've had a very busy week, haven't we, Taylor?
[00:00:49.480] - Taylor
Yeah, definitely.
[00:00:50.980] - Gordon
Should I start do you think?
[00:00:52.210] - Taylor
Yeah, you start this week.
[00:00:53.240] - Gordon
OK, so this week I would like to talk about "Appsumo". Now this is a website which we've mentioned in the past and the reason for bringing it up again is that they have, over the last few months or so, they've brought in a new sort of version of their service. So let me just explain what Appsumo is. Appsumo is a website where you can go and you can purchase lifetime deals for software, and for courses.
[00:01:31.060] - Taylor
Not always.
[00:01:31.750] - Gordon
Mainly software.
[00:01:34.640] - Taylor
Not always lifetime deals though.
[00:01:34.690] - Gordon
Oh, yes, yes. Appsumo always has been lifetime deals. The marketplace however, that is different. So the appsumo itself has been going for many, many years. I think the first purchase I ever made was back in 2000 and maybe 2007, 2009 along, you know, around that sort of time. So 12, 13 years ago and I've bought an awful lot from there. Some things are still running, other things aren't. Some purchases have been really good.
[00:02:08.180] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:02:08.620] - Gordon
Other purchases have not been so good, or they were good and then the service closed down. And that is sort of the problem you get when you use appsumo. Sometimes the software you purchase doesn't last very long. Quite often it does but you get a lifetime deal, which means you get a really good price for running this software that you're purchasing. And it's normally, not always, but it's normally a SaaS. So that's "software as a service", which means that you would log into a website and you would be able to administer whatever it is that the software does from their control panel. So recently they have been adding what's called Appsumo marketplace. So they used to have sort of maybe one or two, at the most, new deals every couple of weeks or so. And that would be it so there'd be a very small number of deals for you to look at, and they were really high quality, weren't they? And they used to be really good deals. And so they would only have sort of seven or eight running at a time. And then when sort of one/two would stop, they'd bring another one/two in. So you always had about eight-ish deals to to look at and work out if it was of use to you or not. Then they brought in marketplace. Now, marketplace is very different. It's not an appsumo recommended product like the products used to be. They are products that people have said, "this is what I do, this is what I sell, I'd like to put it onto the marketplace" and appsumo put it on pretty much, it would appear, without even checking them most of the time, because some of them are a little bit
[00:03:56.860] - Taylor
Interesting.
[00:03:57.620] - Gordon
A little bit iffy if you ask me, some of the deals. And because they've done that, they've had an influx of deals, and I don't know how many are on there at the moment right this minute, but I would guess maybe 300.
[00:04:12.130] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:04:12.460] - Gordon
You know, there is an awful lot of choice on there. And they vary from the SaaS software as a service or downloadable applications; WordPress plugins...
[00:04:30.610] - Taylor
Ebooks
[00:04:31.330] - Gordon
Ebooks is now in there; courses; spreadsheets; WordPress plugins, I think I mentioned that. What else have they got in there? They've got...
[00:04:45.880] - Taylor
A whole load of things really.
[00:04:47.020] - Gordon
Yeah. I mean, one thing we bought the other day, which was actually quite good, is access to a Google Docs document, which has a whole ton of different emails that you can send to people in different situations. So if you've got somebody who's coming back to you and being really awkward, and they're hardly paying anything for your service or your product, it's got a nice way of saying, "look, this is what you get when you pay, what you pay. If you want more, we're not for you. You know, go and take your business elsewhere." But it says it in a nice way. But that's I think that was about 20 dollars ish, something like that. So, you know, that was really reasonable. It's the sort of thing you can collect and you can go back and use again and again. But there are a lot of very odd deals in there as well. One of the one of the big problems now is that there is a service or software website called Code Canyon, which has been going for a very long time and is very well known and it sells scripts. And this is code that you can put together and run a website using their code. Some of it's good, some of it's not so good. Some gets updated, some doesn't get updated. But now what's happening is a lot of people are buying these Code Canyon scripts, and they are then putting them out onto the appsumo Marketplace as a service, which they're then selling. And the problem is, because they haven't created the software themselves, then they're either waiting for Code Canyon to update it, or the software producer on Code Canyon to update it, or they're not updating it at all and they're just using it as a way to get, you know, quick, quick ton of money. And because there are so many services and products and offers on appsumo now, it's become really difficult to find the gems from the rubbish.
[00:06:55.360] - Taylor
They did add a filtering option to only show the kind of appsumo recommended ones and not marketplace ones, because there are a lot of people that did complain, and I know personally that complained and know also the CEO and the person who runs appsumo.
[00:07:14.760] - Gordon
Noah.
[00:07:14.760] - Taylor
Yeah. Basically saying, look, you need to fix this because there's a lot of rubbish on there and it's, you know, annoying to see that stuff.
[00:07:23.310] - Gordon
And it's difficult and it takes time to go through everything. And if you've got Fomo: fear of missing out, then you end up spending a lot of time on the website just looking at all the new things that have come in to see if they're any good. And researching them takes time. But there are some good things in the marketplace. I don't think it's there anymore. But we recently both purchased lifetime access to something called Hockey Stack, which is very, very good. We like that a lot, don't we? Maybe I'll talk about Hockey Stack in another video because it's it's worth talking about, I think. And there's been a few other bits and pieces, some WordPress plugins. You bought a couple recently, haven't you?
[00:08:05.860] - Taylor
Yeah so I bought a templating plug not plugin, SaaS for building react apps, which is kind of moving into more Web apps based stuff rather than websites,
[00:08:21.210] - Gordon
Which is very niche, isn't it?
[00:08:22.410] - Taylor
Yeah, it's something that I kind of
[00:08:23.850] - Gordon
For coders really.
[00:08:24.600] - Taylor
Yeah, I want to look into and explore. So I thought, you know, gives me an idea and shows me how things are set up. But I can kind of study a code and, you know, give me a bit of a starting point, then build my kind of apps from.
[00:08:37.350] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:08:38.550] - Taylor
So what I'll do is I'll put a link to the appsumo my website in the show notes, they have the recommended ones, which are the ones that appsumo have sort of looked at and vetted, if you like. The way to check, the way to know, is that appsumo do their own little tutorial video to tell everyone what it's about, and if that's on there, then it's been vetted by appsumo and if it's not on there, it's a marketplace offering. So go and have a look. And if you find anything that you think is really good, these are all very time-sensitive. So make sure you do it, you know, at the time that you find it, leave a note in the comments so that you can go have a look and see what it is you found and see if there's anything that's any good for the rest of us. So that is a really good resource, although prepare to spend a lot of time and effort finding the good stuff.
[00:09:35.750] - Taylor
Yeah, definitely.
[00:09:37.020] - Gordon
So Taylor, you've had a busy week again. What have you been up to?
[00:09:39.840] - Taylor
So I've been looking at APIs again. I've been kind of really interested in different APIs that are out there and kind of the whole process of being able to fetch the data, post data, things like that. And there's two things I've been working on. One of them is to do with IMDB. So there is an open source alternative to IMDB, which is called...
[00:10:03.270] - Gordon
Do you want to explain what IMDB is for those who don't know?
[00:10:04.740] - Taylor
Yeah, it's basically a movie database.
[00:10:06.990] - Gordon
The Internet Movie Database. That's what IMDB stands for.
[00:10:10.110] - Taylor
Movie database, and there's something called OMDB, which is online movie database, I think.
[00:10:15.140] - Gordon
I think it's open.
[00:10:16.490] - Taylor
Yeah, something like that, but it basically has the same data it pulls from IMDB somehow and you are able to fetch data from it and it's an open API. So I was using that to be able to put in the movie ID for IMDB and then hitting update and automatically populated all of the data from that movie.
[00:10:39.230] - Gordon
So give me an example of what sort of data, your collecting then.
[00:10:42.240] - Taylor
So things like the kind of plot, the director, the actors, genres, the IMDB rating and the Rotten Tomatoes rating, things like that, poster image as well.
[00:10:57.110] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:10:57.860] - Taylor
All the
[00:10:58.520] - Gordon
Trailer sometimes.
[00:10:59.340]
Yeah, all of these types of things are basically on IMDB that can be accessed and just pulling them in without having to manually go in and get the data myself, which is really cool. It's a nice timesaver. And the other one is Instagram. So Instagram are notorious for having a terrible API. They change it a lot and don't really tell you it's going to change.
[00:11:24.440] - Gordon
And they also restrict it quite a bit as well from from being accessed by just anybody.
[00:11:29.510] - Taylor
Yes. So you need, most of the time you need to use an API key and some sort of authentication to prove you have access like a token or something. And that can be annoying, especially if people just want to put an Instagram feed and show the public posts that are available to anyone. It can be very annoying. And I did a, there was someone in my Discord who basically said, you know, this has broken. There was a a JavaScript library that had been built for Instagram, so you basically you just put the code in and it would just populate it and it had broken. And so someone said, you know, any ideas what we can do? So I had a quick look and to see if there was an alternative route to go. So I went with a PHP, which is another coding language, and decided to see if there was an endpoint, which basically if you make a request to the endpoint, it will return you lots of data. And from that you can then pull out and extract the bits of data that you want. And so after a lot of Googling and looking on different forums and stuff, I found that from about 2010 it had changed about six or seven times in terms of being able to access data, not through an API or key, for example. And I managed to figure it out and I managed to make a request and return it. So I've been working on an open source piece of software or bit of code, basically, that allows you to pull in any Instagram feed that's public. It will return you a lot.
[00:13:01.340] - Gordon
And when you say pulling it in, you're pulling it into a website.
[00:13:04.460] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:13:04.850] - Gordon
So a person who has a personal website or a business website can then pull in public images from Instagram.
[00:13:11.900] - Gordon
Exactly. And then you can display them on your website and it will automatically update every single day if you've got a new post.
[00:13:19.620] - Gordon
To show a new post, yeah.
[00:13:20.420] - Taylor
And it works really well. And it's a really nice feature. And it, you know, it's very quick because it gets cached, the data gets cached. You're not making a request to the server to use that data basically every time you load the page, which increases the load time.
[00:13:36.110] - Gordon
Or decreases the load time because it's not doing that, so speeds it up basically.
[00:13:40.940] - Taylor
The JavaScript makes it slower, but caching makes it quicker because it's, we're using the PHP way I've done it makes it quicker because you're not having to make an external request every time.
[00:13:50.690] - Gordon
So you've now created this for use by other people. So, OK, here we go. Big question. How much are you charging for this?
[00:13:57.890] - Taylor
Open source means it's free and so anyone can use the software. I left a "buy me a coffee" donate link in the bottom of the kind of the GitHub repository, which is a, where a lot of open source software goes. And if people want to say thank you, then they can do that. But it's not required, and I just thought I put it in there in case there was anyone.
[00:14:18.710] - Gordon
So it's not a plugin as such. It's just code, isn't it? So they have to put the code into something.
[00:14:22.850] - Taylor
Yeah. Although I saw, I went, I spent a lot of time putting in documentation on how to use the plugin the different parameters that you could use so you could say only return six posts, for example, or only return 12 posts, or whatever you wanted, if you want to show the caption or not. And I put in a lot of different parameters, that people can say yes or no to and then they can customise it how they like. But yeah, you do just put it into your website, with a bit of code, but I put a nice description, and I have a friend who is going to be making a YouTube video on it, which will help even more.
[00:14:55.110] - Gordon
Oh, brilliant. So what we'll do then is we'll put a link to the GitHub resource repository into the show notes. And then as and when the video is released, we'll add that link to the show notes as well. So if you're watching this after it's come out, you should be able to go and see the notes and they'll all be there for you.
[00:15:18.020] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:15:18.510] - Gordon
Fantastic well done Taylor.
[00:15:20.390] - Taylor
It was a nice fun little project.
[00:15:21.440] - Gordon
And the nice thing is you're learning from it and you're learning skills that you can then take on and use for other projects.
[00:15:27.580] - Taylor
Yes, exactly.
[00:15:28.880] - Gordon
So I've got a couple of bits of news which are quite interesting and quite important for most people, I would say. The first bit of news is that PayPal have come out with a brand new idea which they are enforcing on everybody. And that is really weird.
[00:15:49.070] - Taylor
Terms and conditions.
[00:15:49.610] - Gordon
Yeah, terms and conditions have changed. So what they're going to do now is they're going to charge everybody nine pounds or nine dollars, I think, I think it's pounds and dollars is the same, if you have a PayPal account that hasn't been accessed or used in the last 12 months. So if you have an account and it's not costing them anything to run it because you haven't used it, they're going to charge you nine pounds. But it gets silly because it'll only take nine pounds if you have at least nine pounds or whatever is in there, up to nine pounds they will take from your PayPal balance. So if your PayPal balance is zero. And you haven't used it for 12 months, they'll take nothing, if you've got eight pounds in there and you haven't used it for 12 months, they will take that eight pounds.
[00:16:43.820] - Taylor
OK, what about if you've got your bank attached to it.
[00:16:47.160] - Gordon
So that's my recommendation to everybody, don't leave money in PayPal. If you use PayPal on a regular basis, this isn't going to affect you. If, however, you've got a PayPal account, you've got money sitting in there that you just you know, you're leaving it there for a rainy day, now is the time to log in, extract it to a bank account, and then when you want to use that money, it's in your bank account rather than in PayPal, otherwise you may lose it.
[00:17:14.740] - Taylor
What counts as being used? Just making a payment?
[00:17:17.290] - Gordon
So I think, you can log in and that counts as being activity.
[00:17:22.600] - Taylor
OK.
[00:17:23.650] - Gordon
It may be that you have to either buy or send money to someone or receive money.
[00:17:29.050] - Taylor
So you can send 10p to your friend.
[00:17:30.700] - Gordon
I don't think receiving money actually counts, it might count as activity? I'm not entirely sure.
[00:17:35.020] - Taylor
But sending 10p to someone would work?
[00:17:37.150] - Gordon
Sending 10p to yourself, to another account would probably work. Yeah. But it's a bit of a faff, isn't it. Yeah. I mean, the fact is it's a lot easier just to make sure that your paper balance is zero all the time and then you will never end up paying anything. So PayPal is owned by eBay and eBay have come out with some new terms and conditions as well, with new ways of charging you for your online auctions. So it used to be that you would pay 10 percent of the final purchase fee, including the postage, plus you would have the PayPal charges on top of that. So what they've now done is because they own PayPal, they now have bulked these all together and they're now charging you 12.8 percent plus 30p, all in. So they're not adding on the PayPal charges as well.
[00:18:37.920] - Taylor
Does that make it cheaper?
[00:18:38.140] - Gordon
So it depends, if, for example, you are using PayPal to be paid, then you will come out a little bit better off. Ok, it won't cost you quite as much because the way the percentages are working, you end up keeping more money.
[00:18:56.590] - Taylor
It's kind of you take, you do the 10 percent, then you do the 2.8 of that.
[00:19:00.450] - Gordon
Yes. But they, remember they're taking that 12.8 percent from the total. So they're taking it from your payment from the sales total value, plus the shipping.
[00:19:14.350] - Taylor
Yeah. So it works out less because you're doing it not consecutively. So you're not doing 10 percent and then you're doing 2.8 percent.
[00:19:21.400] - Gordon
No, it was on the total anyway. So yes, it makes, it doesn't make a great deal of difference, but you do end up better off. However, the reason I think they're doing this is that a lot of people were doing a payment on pick up, payment on collection, which meant that they weren't using PayPal, which meant they were saving the PayPal transaction costs. Or they were doing it by BACS, or they were doing it in a way other than PayPal, which means that they were saving money. Now, if you're going to carry on doing that, you will still get charged 12.8 percent at the final valuation, including the the shipping costs, no matter what, even if you use PayPal or not. So if you do that, you are actually going to lose 2.8 percent from what you would have previously been paying.
[00:20:21.240] - Taylor
OK.
[00:20:21.700] - Gordon
So that is that is a big change. And I think it's worth mentioning on this channel just so that everybody is aware of it. That's it. That's my news.
[00:20:30.730] - Taylor
Wonderful.
[00:20:31.570] - Gordon
So I think that's everything for today. Thank you for joining us. If you have enjoyed this and you are watching on YouTube or Facebook, please like, share and subscribe, the URLs for that are on the screen now,
[00:20:45.730] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk which has all of our past episodes on there, and you can also search for any of them on there as well.
[00:20:54.340] - Gordon
So thank you for joining us. And please join us again next week on Friday at 1:00 PM. Until then, my name is Gordon. I'm from Drayson Design
[00:21:03.550] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker
[00:21:06.160] - Both
Goodbye.
