Editing The Pen Addict 92/transcript (section)

== Squarespace Sponsorship ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' yes let's take a moment to thank squarespace for sponsoring this episode of the pen addict as they have sponsored so many squarespace they are the all-in-one platform that make it really easy to create your own website for a free trial and 10% off go to squarespace.com and use the offer code tallyho2 that's t-a-l-l-y h-o and the number two let me tell you some very quick things about squarespace so they're always doing great stuff to make sure that their platform's up to date they're always adding new features they have fantastic new designs all the time and they have a really great support team they have 70 dedicated employees at squarespace that are 100% dedicated to their customer care team they deal with support for you they're there 24-7 squarespace take care of all the nasty stuff they take care of hosting take care of seo they give you a responsive web design with beautiful templates that look fantastic on any device but what I want to say is if you've been holding off for any reason about starting your own pen blog this is the place that you should go and try it out squarespace is really easy to set up they walk you through it they help you get it started and you can make the site the way that you want and with a free trial that I mentioned and I'll tell you more about that in a moment it gives you some time to play around with it yourself you get the full squarespace experience and you're able to see if it's the type of thing that you want to do squarespace plans are really affordable and again I'll tell you about those in a minute and they give you everything that you need all in one place if you sign up for a year with squarespace you get a free custom domain name too they can help you out setting up email accounts if that's what you need and they can integrate with google apps and stuff like that but they can also help you out with other email solutions if you want they have ios apps so you can publish to your site and view your statistics they have two different apps for that blog and metrics are the names of the app and they can help so that's that way you can publish from your ipad you can publish from your iphone obviously you can publish from your web browser too but it's just a really really great one stop shop for everything you need to put a website online so if you've been holding off setting up a blog of your own and you've been listening to us and you heard us a couple of weeks ago talk about pen blogging now's the time so go to squarespace right now go to squarespace.com and you can sign up for free for a free trial so you can check it out you don't even need to enter a credit card when you do this you just do name and an email address and a password that's all you need to do to set it up and if you decide to purchase squarespace plans start at just $8 a month which is nothing and as i mentioned before you'll get a free domain name if you sign up for a year or more so that's a really good part of it too so you don't even need to pay extra for that and make sure that you get 10% off and help support this show so you can get 10% off whatever you do and if you buy for a year then you'll get 10% off the whole year as well which is awesome so to do that you want to use the code TALLYHO2 that's T-A-L-L-Y H-O and the number 2 so thank you so much to Squarespace for supporting 5x5 and the pen addict

'''Brad Dowdy:''' you know what Squarespace surprise implemented last week did you catch that that it made a lot of people's day

'''Myke Hurley:''' oh RSS statistics yes so you now know how many people subscribe to your blog for RSS

'''Brad Dowdy:''' yes my tweet was hallelujah

'''Myke Hurley:''' were you happy was it everything you'd wish for

'''Brad Dowdy:''' oh man yeah it was everything I couldn't sleep that morning when I went to bed I was so excited well yeah it's like oh my RSS subscribers are back

'''Myke Hurley:''' yeah because I know that you were upset when that got taken away I think they just I think they had a blog post about it that said they would have just been working on it and they finally got away to do it properly and eat reliably

'''Brad Dowdy:''' yeah well what the issue was is a lot of people myself included wanted to get away from feed burner right because with all the Google just hacking products away left and right you know we were scared to leave our feeds over there and so I just at one point I cut it over to Squarespace but I could never tell how many subscribers I had I kind of had a general idea just doing some some back of the napkin math calculations but now I've got it got it on lockdown so it's perfect it works out well I got a question for you this is unrelated to pens and just hearing you do the Squarespace ad I think that was like maybe your best ad read ever

'''Myke Hurley:''' oh thank you

'''Brad Dowdy:''' and you know I heard you talking with Lex Friedman I don't know a week or two ago and you know we're talking about how Lex does the you know he's done his own podcasting advertising company you need to do your own podcasting advertising read company

'''Myke Hurley:''' oh this is all proprietary software my friend

'''Brad Dowdy:''' yeah I can know do you know who Billy Mays is

'''Myke Hurley:''' no

'''Brad Dowdy:''' have you ever heard that name all right in the US he was like the king of the infomercial and with him infomercial is a lot of times a derogatory term right it's just kind of junk and janky but with him he just like he just owned it you like heard this guy's voice and you knew that this was Billy Mays and it was awesome it was gonna be awesome and he just had this whole thing he died too soon but you're like the Billy Mays of the podcast ad read where you read you read the ad and everyone knows that's a Myke Hurley ad right there that was it for me sorry I've totally gotten this off off the rails but back on the rails I want to talk about the pin blog of the week I feel like we need we need music for that it's the pin blog of the week that works this week I want to talk about my good friend my good online friend Miss Mary Collis from the pin cup she is do you ever talk to people online Myke that you have never met in person but you just know like through through the internet and by how they handle themselves that they are just legitimately nice people and yes yeah I can just tell from all my interactions with Mary over the years that Mary just seems like legitimately awesome she just seems very cool very nice very down to earth you know she's always she's always got energy you know when she's talking about you know pins and everything else so I want y'all to go check out from the pin cup if you don't already she does extremely put me to shame thorough interviews interviews excuse me reviews with awesome pictures incredible handwriting and just real thorough refills on all kinds of pins she's been doing this for a couple years now I remember when she first started she was emailing me but I guess it's been a couple years now that her blog's been out there it's a must read for me she does such an amazing job on every single she never phones in a review I will give her that she's it's just loaded with pictures with details with handwriting examples and y'all should definitely go check her out so if you're not aware of her blog we will have it in the show notes and you should check it out and awesome job Mary so y'all definitely check it out because I don't miss it when she posts I love her posts

'''Myke Hurley:''' perfect alright

'''Brad Dowdy:''' so we got a we have a topic that actually when I thought about doing this topic about everyday carry pins I kind of had to go back through I was like have we ever done a show where we just like dedicated a full segment for everyday carry I know we've talked about it off and on constantly over the years but never I don't know that I've ever dedicated any like huge amount of time to it and what prompted that was I was on a podcast this past weekend called Gear Geeks Live and it's with my friend Tony Scullambrini who writes the everyday commentary blog and he is a big everyday carry guy he reviews knives and flashlights and of course pins and other things that you know a lot of people who are really into this everyday carry thing get into and it's an awesome read and he's a real good guy and he asked me to come on with a couple of his friends that he does the podcast with so I got to thinking they were quizzing me kind of about some everyday carry pins and some things that I liked and some things that I carried so I thought that would make a good topic here because I actually find that talking with Tony and his friends on Gear Geeks that their definition of everyday carry pins is one thing and then the listeners and readers of the pen addict their definition of everyday carry is not completely different but it's definitely different than the guys like on Gear Geeks and that and then that submit to like everyday carry dot com I'll put that in the show notes Myke there's a site called everyday dash carry dot com that's been around forever and a guy named Bernard started it and I used to talk to Bernard all the time when he started his blog and he kind of went on hiatus while he was in school but it's back now and so everyone should check that out too for some some cool EDC suggestions but when I think of everyday carry pin I think of like a singular pin that I can leave the house with throw it in my pocket that's going to be durable it's not going to break it's not going to pop open it's not going to leak ink all over me when I take it out to use it it's going to work immediately without any issue and a lot of times some of the products might have a multiple use so the definition of everyday carry pin that's kind of what I think but you know some people don't take it too far some people just simply say well this is the pin I want to write with today and this is the pin I use primarily so I'm going to take it with me and that's a completely valid like everyday carry aspect and you know looking at how the guys that are into the traditional EDC world which is you know the knives the flashlights the pins everything you carry in a pocket pocket dumps all those things that you know all these guys are into they're looking for like a more serious almost like a tactile pin tactical pin excuse me where you know it's metal for the durability and you know the the refills are like a Fisher Space Pen refill where it can write anywhere which is you know a great quality for a pin and it also a lot of times the looks are very important to where you know the stainless steel color has to match you know their their knife handle and their flashlight color and things like that when they're just putting this whole kind of kit together to whereas you know our listeners are not necessarily looking for that level of everyday carry product they're looking for more the functionality of the pin you know when I was talking to our listeners on Twitter this morning I wanted to hear everyone's everyday carry suggestions and it's really more of a writing experience choice as opposed to a pure functionality choice I guess for everyday carry am I making sense when I'm I'm trying to explain the slight differences between how kind of these two two groups are looking at this everyday carry thing

'''Myke Hurley:''' yeah so what do you so I guess depending on how you perceive the question do you see something as a utility type pen as in that's the everyday carry or do you see it as what pen do you like to use everyday

'''Brad Dowdy:''' right

'''Myke Hurley:''' that's the difference

'''Brad Dowdy:''' right and you know and some of them you know there's there's several pens that kind of combine the two very well but there's a lot of times if you're going for the utility side of thing you give up necessarily the beautiful writing experience right and if you go for the great writing pen you might give up some of the say durability of you know the utility side of side of the ledger so you know I've got a I've got a bunch of pens here a lot of them that kind of lean towards the utility side the the durability and the functionality and just you know the pure just structure of the pen that's going to take a beating and you're still going to be able to write with it and you can throw it in a pocket or a car or a backpack and never have to worry about it so I have a bunch of suggestions here and most of these are really popular pens that people have talked about a lot over the years but they're really popular with the everyday carry community probably the single most popular pen and a lot and a pen that probably a lot of pen addict readers have because it's it's very reasonably priced and it's easy to find it's the Zebra F701 this I think between it and the second item on my list which is the Fisher Space Pen those are the two single most popular pens you see when you hear people talking about just traditional everyday carry the Zebra F701 is I think it's only about seven or eight dollars and it's a fully stainless steel barrel with a knurled grip it's got a retractable um retractable cartridge so you know deployment pen deployment of an everyday carry pen is a key right a lot of people don't want an everyday carry pen with a cap because they'll lose it you know if they're out and about you know especially if you're working outside you know like in you know landscaping or any kind of outdoor work or job site you don't want two parts to your pen but you don't want some plastic barrel pen that's going to snap and crack every time you set it down or get stomped on I mean this Zebra F701 could probably get run over by a truck and you'd be okay and it's got a retractable mechanism um the thing that people do with this F701 it's interestingly not very compatible with other ink refills and the ink refill isn't awesome for this one it's good it's definitely usable but there's pages and pages and pages on everyday carry forums about hacking the Zebra F701 it's probably the single number one most popular everyday carry pen um that you'll see and if you haven't checked it out you know if you're not familiar with the Zebra F701 I mean they're available at Walmart like my local Walmart carries this pen it's very common um you don't have to look too hard to find it and um you it's definitely worth owning one to at least just throw it in your car your backpack and you'll have it it can withstand pretty much everything you you throw at it the one thing it doesn't have what this next item has is the Fisher Space Pen it has the refill the Fisher Space Pen is so popular strictly because of the refill