Editing The Pen Addict 12/transcript (section)

== Squarespace Sponsorship ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' You have, you have. That's why I hire you. That's why I pay you the money. So Squarespace is sponsoring the 70 decibels network for the whole month of May. Um, and on each of the different shows, we're trying to do some different stuff. Um, so some shows we're talking about some of the fantastic features that Squarespace offers like, um, WYSIWYG editing tools and the fantastic iOS app that they use. Um, but they're going to do something a little bit different on this show because I have strong arms, Mr. Brad Dowdy, um, into switching over to Squarespace and you're going to be moving the pen addict blog over.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I am. I am. And we're going to try to accomplish this during the month of May during, um, during, um, the whole month. Squarespace season. Square, yeah, we'll call it Squarespace season. And it wasn't a strong arm at all because I've been very disappointed, um, with my current host and my current blog design and my current setup for probably going on close to two years now.

'''Myke Hurley:''' What's the problem you've had with your hosts?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It, I'm with TypePad right now. I'll sit, there's no hiding that. And the, and that's the issue. The, the rate of change and the quality of the offering has been static for probably about three years now. I've been on there for five. And at first, um, you know, I, what I'm looking in, I'm a busy guy. I got lots going on. So what I'm looking for in a host is not a self hosted platform like WordPress. I've done that before. You know, I've had blogs since, you know, the early two thousands where I'm setting up movable type or, you know, doing, you know, setting my, you know, buying my own space, you know, managing, managing all the backend updates of the code and, and all of that stuff. And I don't have time for that anymore, you know, with kids and work and everything else going on. I, I needed a self hosting, um, site.

'''Myke Hurley:''' One of the great thing in regards to hosting and Squarespace is you don't even need to think about it. The hosting just happens. It's like totally in the background. I don't even consider anything about hosting. I never worry that I've not got enough bandwidth or anything like that. Um, I never worry that like if, you know, I mean, if you're going to get linked on daring fireball, right, you're going to be okay because Squarespace stays up. I've never had Squarespace go down no matter how much traffic we've got. And we've had some pretty big traffic days, um, over the, you know, you can imagine, you know, we, especially if like, say for example, we have like a big landmark episode, you know, like when we had like 10 people on for the hundredth episode of enough, all of those 10 people, you know, a lot of big bloggers linked to the site didn't, didn't even blink. Um, and that's the fantastic thing about Squarespace, the hosting, it just happens. And if you buy their unlimited plan, which starts at $16 a month, then you have unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, but even on the regular plan for $8 a month, it's, it's, you've got such great, um, options there anyway that I don't, I still don't think for most people it'd even be a slight problem.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. Right. And you know, I've, I've, uh, started the process. There's nothing, uh, public I can, I can share yet, but I've, I've, you know, opened my account with Squarespace. I've, I've paid in advance, uh, using our, using our wonderful 70 decibels code. What's that code again, Myke?

'''Myke Hurley:''' It's a, you can go to squarespace.com forward slash 70 decibels to start your two week free trial. And when you come to purchase your site, you can get 10% off your first order with the coupon code 70 decibels five. And obviously that will be in the show notes. So yeah, you've, you've purchased the annual unlimited.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yep. I just, you know, I like to go ahead and, you know, so I don't have to think about it for month to month. I just went ahead and purchased the annual unlimited. I've started trying to, the themes are awesome. They're, um, uh, they're really look up to date and current, um, which is something the pin addict in its current state is not. So I'm going

'''Myke Hurley:''' to, I mean, that was, I mean, we had this conversation a little while ago, didn't we? Even before we had Squarespace come on as a sponsor for sure. Um, I was trying to be very nice to you, but say to you at the same time that your site looks very old and it

'''Brad Dowdy:''' does. There's no doubt. There's no doubt, you know, so it, it needs some work.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Exactly. And the thing about Squarespace is even though there's templates, they're not templates like type pad templates. You have complete control over them. You can move the widths. You can change the sizes, all of the fonts. They use Google fonts, the Google font library. That's all built straight into the site. So you can pick from hundreds of pretty good looking web fonts, you know, for free, um, which is fantastic. And you can make your site look exactly the way that you want it. So yes, go to 70 decibels. Sorry, if you go to squarespace.com forward slash 70 decibels, use the coupon code 70 decibels five for 10% off. And we're going to be talking about Squarespace throughout the whole month

'''Brad Dowdy:''' of May. Yep. Yep. So, uh, if you guys see any downtime this weekend, I might have a chunk of time to, uh, to work on this. So, uh, yeah, I'll follow me on Twitter at dowdyism, D O W D Y I S M. If you're wondering why the site's down, you might want to check Twitter first. That means I might, uh, I might, uh, I might have my, uh, my hands full, but, uh, deep in there somewhere. Yeah. So, uh, if you see anything funky going on this weekend, it might just be that, uh, that's, uh, convert to Squarespace day. So I'm looking forward to that. Awesome. Cannot wait to see it. Yep. So email. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We've got a very interesting one here. Okay. And it was so interesting. I actually put a post up on the blog today, which I'm normally a Monday, Wednesday, Friday review blog. And, uh, you know, I'll pop in some, uh, some interesting tidbits on Tuesdays or Thursdays. And this was so interesting that, cause I have no clue, but I thought the question was interesting enough. Um, it's from pen addict reader. I'm going to butcher his name. I'm going to go with Kaveh K A V E H. He emailed me. He's, he travels to Marriott and you know, we all talk about hotel pins. A lot of them are the famous big ballpoint hotel pins and Marriott, you know, has the courtyard and you have the labeling and all the, all the colors of their pins are the same except for the red one. All the barrel designs I should say are the same except for the red one. The red one has a set of, of dashed lines on the back of the barrel. So he sent me an email. I was wondering if you know what the meaning is of the red bars on the back of the red Marriott stick pins. All the other colors just have courtyard.com on back. At first I thought it was a Fibonacci sequence, but the measurements don't exactly add up. I know Marriott's a Mormon company, so maybe it symbolizes something in Mormonism. Either way, it's on all the red pins I've seen and nobody has a good explanation. Well, I certainly don't have a good explanation. I'm going to guess Myke, you probably don't know either.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I had no idea about this until I saw you tweet about it earlier today. And I was hoping, started reading and I was hoping for an answer, but even you didn't have one.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' No, it's, uh, you know, it might be nothing. My, my initial guess is it's nothing, but there's, um, the, I, I put the penatic readers, uh, to, to the test. I've already got one guy. He submitted the question to Marriott.com. It's been tweeted to the Marriott Twitter handle.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I don't think it's nothing. Yeah. It seems like it sticks out too much. Like, you know,

'''Brad Dowdy:''' why would you even do it? Yeah, exactly. Because it's different than the rest of them. I mean, you would, you would think for, you know, that would be a cost savings to make everything the same for a company that size. So to take one pin and do something different with it, it was the least worth the question. I thought it was an interesting question. Is it Morse code? No. Um, someone's, someone said, since there's more than two sizes, we can rule out Morse code. So there's more than two sizes of dashes. Um, someone said, maybe it has something to do with colorblind, being able to distinguish the red from a different color. Um, you know, the, someone's already chimed in on the Mormonism aspect and said, there's nothing, no symbolism there that's a relevant. So we'll see if, uh, we'll, we'll link to that in the, in the show notes. If anyone has any ideas about that, I thought it was an interesting question to pose.