[00:00:00.00] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.14] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:10.01] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:12.02] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.27] - 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 thank you so much for joining us.
[00:00:25.09] - Taylor
Welcome back.
[00:00:26.00] - Gordon
We didn't have an episode last week, and I will explain that in my part and explain why we didn't have an episode. But let's get straight into our topics. Would you like to go first or shall I?
[00:00:40.03] - Taylor
Well, since you've already mentioned partly about your topic, I think you should go first.
[00:00:44.00] - Gordon
All right, I'm going to go first. So my topic today is putting your life on hold. Now, one of the reasons that we didn't have an episode last week is because we were both extremely busy or tired. I was doing a play, a local amateur play that is something I do for fun. We did Brief Encounter. You came to see it, didn't you?
[00:01:09.25] - Taylor
It was very good.
[00:01:10.14] - Gordon
Yeah. And that takes up a lot of time because not only have you got the performances, which take up every day in a week, effectively, but you've also got all the rehearsals before that. And so I basically, for that last week, I basically during the late afternoon into the evenings, I put my life on hold. I didn't do anything other than the play. And funny enough, I finished the play on the Saturday night. I had a day off on the Sunday, which wasn't really a day off because I was out doing my day job, which was a children's party on that occasion. And then on the Monday, I started rehearsals for Pantomime, which we do in January. So that's going to be a couple of evenings a week for the next three months.
[00:02:01.02] - Gordon
And then when we get close, again, everything will shut down while the show is on. Now, I do this for fun, and I do them because I want to do them. But it also means that my life's sort of put on pause for a little bit. I'm not able to do what I normally do because I don't have as many hours in the day to do them, because I'm busy doing these plays. I also have a friend of mine who recently, he's a self-employed magician also, he recently, unexpectedly, as is always the case, had a heart attack. And he had proper surgery, and he was in a different country at the time, which is why I say proper surgery. But he had surgery and he came back home again and he was told to have two months of rest, which meant that all of the shows that he had booked, he couldn't do. Now, if you are are on a salary, then that shouldn't be much of a problem. You still get paid, you get sick leave. But when you work for yourself, there is no such thing as sick leave. So not only do you have to think about how you're going to get some income, how are you going to survive, in my friend's case, for two months, but also how are you going to manage any projects or customers that you have on going. Maybe they've got deadlines that you need to meet and you can't meet them because you're not able to work. These are the sort of things that maybe we don't expect and we really should plan for. You should have some sort of system in place so that were you unable to work, you would still be able to have an income. I have an insurance, in fact, for self-employment. And if I'm unable to walk - unable to work or incapacitated, then it pays me a weekly fee after a period of time so that I've got income that I can then use to live on. So that's something that you should look into if you're self-employed. Do you have anything like that?
[00:04:23.25] - Taylor
Yeah. So I have a critical illness cover and I don't think I have income protection, but I have another insurance for myself as a person.
[00:04:34.26] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:04:35.13] - Taylor
And we have an insurance broker in my BNI chapter, and something that he said was really interesting and fascinating, which he said, "Do you insure your car? Yes. Do you insure your house, your contents? Do you insure your pets? Yes. Do you insure the thing that pays for all these insurances?" And a lot of people went, "Oh, I don't." They didn't think, "Well, if something happens to me, how am I going to pay for all of the things that I'm trying to cover?" And it put into perspective how many people didn't have any backup or system. But, yeah, it's something that people just don't, or forget about.
[00:05:22.21] - Gordon
Yeah. So the income side of it is a really important thing that I decided many, many years ago, very close to when I started being self-employed, I had the same opinion. I thought, "if I'm unable to work, then I still want to be able to support my family. I want to be able to pay my bills. I don't want to rely on other people doing extra work just to cover my incapacitation." So that's something I put in place a long time ago, and that's something you should definitely look at if you don't have a steady income that is going to continue if you're not able to work. The other thing is to make sure that you have your customers covered as well. Now, in a way, we are lucky because we both do part of a job which is similar. So we understand what is needed from the other person, were they to be unable to work and there's projects that need finishing. And even if I can't take over the developing side of it, I will be able to understand enough to be able to get that job done by other people that we know, and make sure that I could project manage it, for example, and make sure it gets done to a level that it should be done at without you having to worry that you're going to be letting your customers down.
[00:06:53.14] - Gordon
And it's similar the other way around. If I'm incapacitated, then you have access to my computer, you have access to my hosting, you can get to my email, you can see what customers I have, you can deal with it that way. And that is something that we put in place. Not something that we actually sat down and discussed, but it's an unwritten process that we've put in place so that we will cover each other's businesses. And it means that our customers get a bit of backup and a bit of security. They know that if something happens to a one-man band, then it's not all going to fall apart, and they're not going to have a nightmare trying to get access to their website and their domain names and everything else. Because the person who controls them can't deal with it.
[00:07:48.27] - Taylor
Yeah, so I've won a couple of projects where that was the case, where the person had a freelancer or someone that owned their own business, and it was only that one person, and the person just went missing. They just stopped replying and stuff. Now, obviously, that could, I guess, technically happen, even if you do have things in place because you could just ignore the person. But I've explained to clients and stuff who have asked and said, "what happens if something happens to you?" And I said, "well, my dad has access to all of my logins. He also runs a company that does web design, and we have it basically. We've basically said, if something happens, then the other person will deal with it."
[00:08:30.25] - Gordon
And we have lots of colleagues and friends in the business that can help out should we need them. It's the sort of business where you know lots of people. And if anybody has a problem, everyone will just help out as much as they can, depending on what they're able to do. So that is my topic. Basically, if you put your life on hold, whether it's by choice, as it was for me, but that was only for a week, and I knew about it, so I could plan for it. Or if it's two months, like my friend, that he wasn't expecting, then have you got a way to deal with your business, your customers, your income, your life, if that happens. And if you don't, well, maybe it's worth just spending a bit of time on and just thinking about what you would do in that situation, because it's much better to be be able to think about it when you're not worrying about life than if you are in some sort of situation that then makes it very, very stressful. Plan ahead.
[00:09:41.16] - Taylor
It's also less what you would do and more what you want to do, because sometimes how you end up dealing with something is not how you would like to or want to do it. It's just the way you have to do it because you don't have any other options.
[00:09:55.08] - Gordon
Yeah. So there we go. That's my topic: plan ahead. We always like planning ahead. We always like putting processes in place. And that's just something that I discovered a long time ago and thought was really important, and I thought I would share it with you today. What would you like to speak about, Taylor?
[00:10:13.24] - Taylor
So I've been planning ahead. So for a client project, I have decided to use a content management system, CMS, called Statamic.
[00:10:24.18] - Gordon
Okay.
[00:10:25.04] - Taylor
So Statamic is another content management system, similar to WordPress, similar to other content management systems out there. I don't know if Squarespace or Wix count as CMS's, but essentially what they do is they allow you to hold your data, install your data in a structured way. Most of the websites that I build are WordPress. However, for this client project, they run a tour operator. They're a tour operator, so they have lots and lots of tours, which are also linked to destinations, which have multiple hierarchies. So you've got the territory; so you've got things like Europe, Middle East, Central Asia. You've then got the country level, and then you've also got regions within a country. You also then have places which will be inside of a country. You then have, what's it called? Accommodation. So accommodation will be linked to a place. You have reviews, and they have their blog and guides to that country for useful information. And they have all of these linked between each other. And I normally would build something like this in WordPress using something like ACF, which is a custom field plug-in.
[00:11:41.13] - Taylor
But I realised that as I started building it, that the scope of the project and the size of the project was going to outgrow WordPress very, very quickly because of the vast number of entries that they have on their current site. So their current site was built about 10 years ago originally, and I think they're up to around about 10,000 entries across all of the different collections and post types. So I started looking at other options. There are headless options, which basically means there's no front-end, it's just the back-end, and you basically have to build it out with something else. There are other platforms that are hosted, so you don't own the rights to them because they're not open source. I came across the one called Statamic, which is the one I decided to go with. It's based on PHP, which is also what WordPress is built with. So I'm not stretching too far away from what I know. The admin side of it is built with vue.js. Again, not something I really need to worry about because it's just handling everything for me. And it's all built on flat files. So there's no database per se for the main part of Statamic.
[00:12:54.24] - Taylor
And what this means is when you change something in the editor, it then writes that to a file, a flat file in YAML format. And this is really useful because you can then push all of your content to GitHub, and you then have everything Git tracked. So you can always go back in the past and see every single commit for an entry. So there's no revisions per se, because you can just go to Git, find what the chains that you broke or you missed and pull it back. But then reading from files isn't very fast. So they have their own caching system called a stache, S-T-A-C-H-E. And what this does is essentially write all of the entries to JSON files, which is very, very quick to query. And this then makes it very, very easy and fast while maintaining compatibility. If there's multiple people working on the project and you have multiple fields in different collections and so on updates the collection, then you can then pull those in and you're all in sync, whereas by doing it in a database, it's much harder to sync databases than it is just files. So yeah, this is something that I've started working on.
[00:14:10.23] - Taylor
It's a lot different to what I normally do. There's a lot more custom work to be done. However, the parts that I would have to do custom in WordPress, they're just all handled for me, which is really nice. But then things that are already done for me that a lot of plug-ins do, I have to do myself, which isn't necessarily a bad thing because it means I have more control, just means I have to implement them and there's not pre-made stuff out of the box for me to use.
[00:14:39.00] - Gordon
I'm glad you explained that there was a Statamic caching system because I've looked at using flat files, text files, if you like, in the past, and you're right, it is very, very slow to run a site using that.
[00:14:58.17] - Taylor
Because you're essentially querying - So if you want to do a search for a single word, you'd have to query every single entry and file.
[00:15:05.19] - Gordon
Yeah, exactly. And that takes time.
[00:15:07.00] - Taylor
Look inside of it. Go to the next one, look inside of it. Go to the next one, look inside of it.
[00:15:11.14] - Gordon
And even with solid state storage these days, that's still going to be time consuming.
[00:15:18.03] - Taylor
Yeah. So it's why whenever you have a file system like Finder or whatever file system, they usually create indexes, which is essentially what they've done. If they've created an index, so then when you are trying to access an entry, it has all of it indexed for you to be able to be very, very quick.
[00:15:35.21] - Gordon
And is Statamic open source?
[00:15:38.11] - Taylor
So they have an open source version, and then they have a pro version which adds more features, so things like having more than one user or being able to use the REST API. So if you want to run a headless site on it or you want to use it externally in some sort of automations that you have, you can access it from there. But yeah, the core of it is all open source. It's built on top of Laravel, which is a very, very big PHP framework. A lot of people use Laravel for building applications, web applications and things like that. The original site for this for my client actually was built with Laravel, which was quite interesting and also quite nice because I can see how they structure stuff, how they set things up. And if I need to, I can pull some of the stuff that they've got.
[00:16:27.19] - Gordon
Sort of standing on the shoulder of people before you, in this case.
[00:16:31.12] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:16:31.26] - Gordon
Yeah, very good. So that is something that you are working on at the moment. Sounds like there's a bit more work than you might have expected if you were thinking it might have worked on WordPress.
[00:16:44.01] - Taylor
Well, I knew it was going to be a big project, and I was already planning to do a lot of more custom things to the site above what default WordPress does. And I started doing that and then realised that I was basically undoing a lot of what WordPress was doing for me under the hood and just fighting against it. Because there were certain URL structures that I wanted where some of the URL structures I have include, so say for a tour, would be slash the country, slash tours, slash the country name. Normally, you would just be either slash tours and then slash the slug or whatever the name of the tour is. But because I want to basically use relationships within the URL structure, it becomes a lot more complex because you have to make sure you grab that data out before, and then trying to match that is obviously a lot more complex than it would be if you were doing it in another way. But it also gives me a chance to test out Statamic and also test out Laravel because my personal site, I wanted to rebuild into something that, again, is more scalable because, again, I was reaching the limitations of WordPress.
[00:17:51.24] - Taylor
And one of the issues that I always was worrying about was it's flat files. It's not going to be very fast. But there are really good caching systems in place. There's a lot, there's more aggressive options you can enable in Statamic, or if you need to, you can actually convert it into a database if you need. But by testing it out with a client project I'm able to test the waters, figure out what's possible, what's not possible, what the best thing is to do, so that when I come to build my personal site, I have a good idea of where everything is, what's possible, and things like that.
[00:18:28.19] - Gordon
Very good. That was very exciting. That's everything from me.
[00:18:33.21] - Taylor
And me as well.
[00:18:34.18] - Gordon
Thank you so much for joining us. As always, please like, share, and subscribe on YouTube.
[00:18:41.29] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk and find all of our past episodes.
[00:18:46.21] - Gordon
And if you would prefer to listen to us, we're on all the major podcast platforms and your smart speakers. Just ask them to play or do a search for "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." All being well, assuming we're not putting our life on pause next week, we'll be back with you at 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:19:09.01] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:19:11.20] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:19:12.08] - Taylor
Bye.
