Editing The Pen Addict 401/transcript (section)

== Community Stewardship ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Like I just want to help. I just want to help people. Like that's it. Yeah. Like I share all my stuff. I spread the word. And, you know, I just try to be a good steward of the community and, you know, practice what I preach.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So there's like Tony in the chat room is calling you the John Gruber of stationery, which is means something in my world. I mean, I refer to you as as that as like so in in the Apple technology world, which is what I'm mostly in. John Gruber is like one of the most important people in that community. He's been doing it for longer than anybody else. And his kind of model for creating a blog has proliferated out and lots of tech focused blogs, especially run by individuals or small companies, mirror some of the ideas that he created. John Gruber is also the creator of the Markdown language of text. If you're familiar with that, like it's like a text markup language called Markdown, which is used everywhere now. Like Slack's text markup languages Markdown.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Reddit's is pretty close. Yeah. A lot of it is based on that. It's used everywhere.

'''Myke Hurley:''' One of my favorite things that I like to say to people that I'm sure makes Brad want to kill me is that the pen addict has higher traffic than Darren Fireball, John Gruber's blog. So I always find that kind of funny. Because both you and John, I mean, at least I know that you both used to at one point, if not still, like on your advertising page, publish your page views. Yeah. And yours are larger.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I haven't updated mine in a while. It varies. You know, I stopped writing for Google, right? Like I don't concern myself with the numbers anymore, right? You get to a point. Like I think you should, like if you're starting your blog and you're just getting started and you're a year or two into it, you should absolutely be concerned. Like you should look at the numbers all the time. I haven't looked at Google Analytics and probably since the last time I updated that, which was probably like a year and a half ago. I literally have no idea. Because it changed. It changes. It may have changed. But there was a time.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I know there was a time when your website was larger. But it makes sense though, because the pen addict itself and the content that goes on it is very Google friendly.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It is. It is. That's why I don't worry about doing more, right? I don't have the bandwidth to care what my SEO is. Yeah. Or what keywords I'm using.

'''Myke Hurley:''' All the time when I'm looking for a pen, you come first. Like even if I'm signed out in Google, like if I search for a specific pen, the pen addict comes first and it's one of those inertia things, right?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, exactly. Time helps. So that's why I tell everyone if you want to start, start. Because, you know, the only thing you've missed out on is time. And you can correct that.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. You certainly can.