[00:00:09.06] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.28] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:10.13] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:12.08] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.29] - 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 7 days. And thank you for joining us. It's been a week of visiting Poland for us. And in fact, I think that's probably what our whole episode is going to be about today. But before we get to that, new surroundings.
[00:00:40.10] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:00:40.12] - Gordon
Yeah. We are here. This is my office. I don't think we've recorded an episode in my office before.
[00:00:46.13] - Taylor
I don't think we have.
[00:00:47.09] - Gordon
No. So the reason for this is because we don't have the normal tripod that we normally have for the camera. So we've sort of had to make do at the moment. So hopefully it's going to look just as good as it normally does, maybe even better. And for those of you who are watching this, you get a different background to see for a change. Okay, let's get straight into our topic. Right, well, let's start with you, Taylor. Tell everyone what we've been doing over the last 7 days.
[00:01:18.19] - Taylor
So we went to WordCamp Europe, and this year it was in Poland. In Kraków, and it was really fun.
[00:01:28.29] - Gordon
Yeah, so I've never been to Poland before, so Kraków was quite an interesting trip for me in that respect. But also the whole fact that we were going to WordCamp was good because this is my third year and your...
[00:01:43.23] - Taylor
Fifth.
[00:01:44.20] - Gordon
Fifth year. Okay, so let's explain what WordCamp is for those who don't know. There is a software that runs over half of the websites on the internet called WordPress. And WordCamp, WordCamp Europe in particular, is one of the conventions that's held every year. This one's in Europe. There's one in Asia. There's one in America.
[00:02:11.23] - Taylor
And there's lots of smaller ones.
[00:02:13.06] - Gordon
And there's lots of small sort of city/town-based ones as well. But the European one is the biggest. So I think there were 2,600 people there this year.
[00:02:27.06] - Taylor
Something like that, yeah.
[00:02:28.08] - Gordon
So huge numbers, all descending on Kraków to talk about WordPress and find out what's new, see how people are doing other things. Lots of plug-ins and extensions that go along with WordPress. Lots of people to talk to. Pretty much everyone had a laptop with them. You could just see people everywhere just sitting down with laptops. What's the reason for you going to WordCamp, Taylor?
[00:03:01.04] - Taylor
I like to see friends. I have a lot of friends around the world that kind of all come to WordCamp every year. And so for me, it's a chance to catch up with them, hang out with them and just chat.
[00:03:12.27] - Gordon
So it's the networking side of it and the keeping up with your friends. It's a little bit like me going to my Blackpool Magic Convention. I like going because I enjoy seeing my friends. And seeing people that I haven't seen for a while and catching up with them and having a good time, really. Yeah. So that's the reason you went. Anything, did you learn anything?
[00:03:35.28] - Taylor
There were some interesting talks that I went to as well, which again, I found interesting even if they weren't really relevant to me or my business. And there are a couple that were actually quite interesting that I'm going to potentially implement and, kind of use.
[00:03:54.16] - Gordon
So the main theme for this year seemed to be AI, didn't it?
[00:03:59.24] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:04:00.05] - Gordon
So linking WordPress to AI or using AI to build plug-ins or using AI to correct your grammar and spelling. What else was there? Yeah, just AI everything really. Linking WordPress using MCP to Claude, for example, is a really interesting case. So you can then give access to your whole WordPress website to your AI chatbot or coder and basically say, you know, "go and have a look at my site. Anything that has a calendar on the page, then, pull it all from custom fields and I want the fields to be this, this and this and anything else you think I need" and just let it get on with it.
[00:04:55.03] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:04:55.13] - Gordon
It's very interesting. You do still, I think after listening to all the talks, you do, the overriding sort of theme was that you still need to know what you're doing.
[00:05:07.17] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:05:08.04] - Gordon
I think that's the same with any AI really, isn't it? You need to know what you're doing and what you want to get out of it, not just blindly use it and hope that what it gives you is correct because that's a recipe for disaster, isn't it?
[00:05:20.18] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:05:21.03] - Gordon
Yeah, you need to understand the backend of what it's doing, not physically how it's working, but what it's actually achieving so that you can then go and check it and make sure that it's not going to, you know, blow up your website or something. Because, you know, there are people out there who've managed to give a wrong prompt and managed to delete a tonne of stuff, which they didn't want to delete. And that's never good. We don't want that to happen to anyone. So, WordCamp as a convention, let's just talk about that. They had a convention centre that we were in. There was 4 floors?
[00:06:02.22] - Taylor
Something like that, yeah.
[00:06:04.29] - Gordon
Two tracks, so basically two big lecture rooms. One of them was huge.
[00:06:12.13] - Taylor
More like auditoriums.
[00:06:13.16] - Gordon
Yeah, they were really big, like 2,000, 3,000 people in them. Amazing. And they had big screens up, and this year they were doing live translation, not necessarily on the screen. They were doing live transcriptions on the screen, but apparently they were doing live translations. If you sort of held your phone up and scanned the QR code, you could then tell it which language you wanted and then sort of put your headphones in and listen to what they were saying in your own language, which is really cool and something I've looked into and found to be very expensive, mainly because it's live. So, it was good to see them doing that. Every floor had food on it. So, there were always drinks available, always snacks available. They had breakfast and lunch available for everybody. And when you consider there's 2,600 people, that's a huge undertaking to make sure everyone's fed.
[00:07:11.19] - Taylor
Keeping everything stocked up.
[00:07:12.28] - Gordon
Yeah. And I think the reason for it was to keep everyone in the building and sort of keep them as part of the convention rather than them having to go out and find food somewhere. Because, you know, all the poor restaurants nearby or fast food places would have had, you know, potentially 2,000 people descending upon them in one hour. And that's just not fair for any company, is it? It's a bit like a DDoS attack on a restaurant. So that was that. Lots of meeting up with other people that we know. We met Jewel Shahjahan. That was lovely. We met Steve Woody, which was lovely. Nice surprise. Didn't know he was going to be there. We met up with Kees and Jamie and, who have I missed? Chris.
[00:08:06.08] - Taylor
Just a couple of other people.
[00:08:08.04] - Gordon
Yeah. And some others. So thanks for those people who were there. It was lovely to see you. There were also lots of parties that we got invited to.
[00:08:18.21] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:08:19.00] - Gordon
So they were sort of night-time parties that we went to. And again, that consisted of more networking, a little bit of drinking. I wasn't feeling too good on the first night. So you went out. What happened on the first night?
[00:08:32.08] - Taylor
I just, we went to, well, I originally went out for a walk. So Jamie and I went for a walk after he'd had some food and he was going to the party and I was just going to explore the city because it was like the first kind of night. And I somehow ended up getting dragged into the party and then we ended up going out. Ended up at a club. Yeah.
[00:08:56.21] - Gordon
Yeah. Got in quite late, I seem to remember. That seemed to be a recurring theme. But, you know, you have to enjoy these times while you can because, you know, they only come around, you know, once a year in this case. So it's nice to go out and see these people and spend time with them. I went out with you on the second night and we did very similar sort of thing, went to one of the parties. Do you want to give a shout out to WP Umbrella?
[00:09:24.01] - Taylor
Yeah, Aurelio, who is a lovely guy. And we were chatting for quite a while and was one of the first kind of people that I met at, I think it was Athens, no, WordCamp Porto, which was my first ever WordCamp. And yeah, I met him for the first time and now he's, you know, he's doing great.
[00:09:44.13] - Gordon
He's doing really well. Yeah, it's a great product for those. I'm going to, I'm going to put a link in the notes for this, WP Umbrella. It's a way to manage your WordPress websites. If you've got more than one, it's really, really useful for upgrading plug-ins and themes and everything else, as well as sort of keeping an eye on the health of your website. And you can do it for multiple websites in one dashboard. That's the, that's sort of like the truncated version of it. So that was really good. So let's talk about the venue, or rather the country, Kraków. The city of Kraków, I've never been to Poland, so this was all very new to me. What was your overriding experience of the city and the country?
[00:10:32.13] - Taylor
I really enjoyed it. I thought the food was really nice. I thought the—
[00:10:38.10] - Gordon
What did you really like food-wise?
[00:10:40.10] - Taylor
We had pierogi, which is very nice.
[00:10:42.09] - Gordon
Pierogi.
[00:10:43.01] - Taylor
Like dumplings.
[00:10:44.16] - Gordon
Steamed dumplings with something inside. You had cottage cheese and potato, I seem to remember.
[00:10:49.20] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:10:50.00] - Gordon
Yeah, I had a meat one, which I think was pork. So, yeah, go on.
[00:10:55.01] - Taylor
The city was really nice. A really nice city. Really pretty.
[00:10:58.18] - Gordon
Really clean as well, I thought. They kept it nice and clean. There was a castle we looked around.
[00:11:03.10] - Taylor
Yeah, a river.
[00:11:04.15] - Gordon
Yeah, a big river that we crossed many times.
[00:11:07.26] - Taylor
And it was also relatively cheap as well when you compare it to— when you compare it to London, it's quite cheap. Obviously, if you're in a different country, it could be expensive, but not as expensive as last year when we were in Switzerland.
[00:11:20.19] - Gordon
Oh, yeah. That was really expensive. I guess if you average out the two, last year and this year. They're just sort of normal prices, but yeah, you could definitely tell the difference. To give you an idea, we got an Uber from our Airbnb to the airport on our last day, and that was about a 20-minute journey, 25-minute journey, and apparently it's 5 sloten to get into the airport. So they had a price to get in there, so that was included, and it cost us £10.
[00:11:51.04] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:11:51.23] - Gordon
You know, it was a £1 fee to get into the airport if you're driving and, you know, so £9 for a 20-minute journey in an Uber, which is, you know, unheard of anywhere else in London, that's for sure.
[00:12:05.10] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:12:05.19] - Gordon
We also did a couple of trips. We went to the salt mine, which was really, really interesting. Just a whole mine with lots of sculptures that had been sort of carved into the rock salt walls, just phenomenal, going back to like the 1700s and even earlier, I think, in fact. Yeah, so that was really interesting. If you ever go to Kraków, definitely make a trip to the salt mines.
[00:12:36.01] - Gordon
That's reasonably close. That was about half an hour away, wasn't it, by train? Again, very cheap train. I think we paid about £3 return from Kraków for a half-hour journey there and a half-hour journey back. Nothing really, is it? We also went to Auschwitz, which was very interesting, if not a little harrowing. I've, as you know, just finished doing "The Diary of Anne Frank," and all of the people that were portrayed in that play went to Auschwitz at some point. Some of them stayed there, others went on to other concentration camps, and that was a real eye-opener, wasn't it? I thought they'd done it very well though, because you've got Auschwitz I, which is where all the brick buildings are and all the blocks, and they'd sort of converted a lot of the blocks into memorials with sort of explanations and photos, and there was a whole room full of shoes that were just, you know, discovered at Auschwitz, because a lot of people were killed there, and they got them to take all their clothes off before they went in to get, you know, exterminated, as they kept saying. So, they had all these clothes, and there was just a whole room of shoes, which was, you know, scary really to think of all the people that owned them.
[00:14:06.06] - Gordon
And then there was a room with a, one long side cabinet. So a really long room just full of hair because they shaved people's head for many reasons. One, for hygiene reasons, but the main reason was so that if anyone escaped, they would very easily be able to see who they were because they were shaved, you know. Anyone who had long hair that hadn't been cut, they knew was not part of the camp. So I didn't know that. That was quite interesting. But it was all, it was quite, quite well done in that respect. And we could go into different blocks and see what was going on. And then you had the other part of it, which was called Belk—
[00:14:52.23] - Taylor
Birkenau.
[00:14:53.16] - Gordon
Birkenau. Thank you. I had forgotten the name of it, which is the iconic view of the entrance with the train track going through the middle. So they would just lead people straight in by train, straight into the death camp. And there were up to, I think there was 5 gas chambers at one point, which was, you know, quite scary in the number of people that were executed there, murdered there. The other thing I found that I didn't know before was the gas chambers were using something called something B, was it Zyklon B, which were sort of pellets that you burn and they give off gas. And the reason for this product is so that it can sort of clean your clothes of any lice and creatures and and stuff, and it just kills them dead so that your clothes are sort of sanitised. And the Germans discovered that this might work on people as well. So it wasn't piping in gas, which is what I assumed a gas chamber would be. It was setting fire to these cans of Zyklon B, and they very quickly figured out how much they needed to be efficient.
[00:16:15.16] - Gordon
And it's just horrible to think about. But it was a really nice rounding off of my Anne Frank experience to sort of visit the place that they all visited and, you know, all but Otto Frank died in a concentration camp of some sort. So that was sort of like a closure for me in some respects, but it was well worth going to see if not, you know, horrific at the same time, don't you think? Yeah, definitely. Did you learn much from there? Did you know much about it before you went?
[00:16:52.07] - Taylor
I did know parts, but yeah, I learned a lot.
[00:16:55.11] - Gordon
I need to watch Schindler's List again because I saw that maybe 30 years ago at the cinema and now I've been to Auschwitz, I want to watch it again with, you know, renewed knowledge in my head of how everything worked. Next year is going to be in Spain. We're going to Malaga. They've moved it to about a week earlier, two weeks earlier. No, a week earlier. So it's the end of May. So we're going there, right?
[00:17:26.29] - Taylor
We are.
[00:17:27.26] - Gordon
Okay. So we'll be going to Malaga and we'll tell you all about it next year. And we'll see, you know, what the, what WordCamp is, what WordPress is doing at the time and what the experience of it all is as far as everyone else is concerned. Plus we get to see our friends and have a few drinks. Anything else you want to say about the trip?
[00:17:49.26] - Taylor
Don't think so.
[00:17:50.28] - Gordon
Well worth going to. We did manage to get some work done while we were out there, but not as much as we would normally do. So this week has been a sort of a catch-up week.
[00:18:00.09] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:18:00.20] - Gordon
We got home very early on Tuesday morning. I think we were landing about midnight and then we had to obviously get home from there. So didn't get to bed till about half past 1 in the morning, quarter to 2. What time were you up? You had a nice lie-in, I hope.
[00:18:16.09] - Taylor
I think I was awake at half 5.
[00:18:18.15] - Gordon
Half 5, right, in the morning.
[00:18:20.16] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:18:21.00] - Gordon
Right, yes, because Taylor has BNI, so he was off doing that. I had a nice little sleep. I had Drama Kids in the afternoon. That was all I had. Anyway, thank you so much for joining us. If WordCamp is something you think might be of interest to you, WordCamp Europe is on next May. I am going to Malaga. Make sure you get tickets and get your accommodation and flights because it's going to be a busy one. I think there's going to be lots of people going. Thank you for joining us. As always, if you're on YouTube, please like, share, and subscribe.
[00:18:55.25] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.
[00:19:00.16] - Gordon
And if you would prefer to listen to us instead of watch us, we're on all the major podcast platforms, and you can even ask your smart speaker to play "This Week with Taylor and Gordon," and it will play the latest episode for you. We'll be back with you probably in our normal location next week, once things get back to normal. Next week at 1 o'clock on Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:19:27.01] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:19:29.16] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:19:29.29] - Taylor
Bye.
