Editing The Pen Addict 127/transcript (section)

== Domain Names ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' Let's talk about our second sponsor for this week. And it's our friends over at Hover. We love Hover. Hover.com is the place to buy and manage domain names. Me and Brad use Hover.com. It's the only place that we think about buying domains. And it's because they just do everything right. And they do it better than anybody else. They make it so easy to search for domains. So you've got a great idea for a business or maybe you just want to check if something's available because you had a really funny idea to troll Brad in some sort of way. You know, you should always be buying domain names to somehow troll Brad. I heartily endorse that.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Nakaya.sexy.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Something like that. Yes, because they do all of those sort of top-level domains. Not only can you get all the top .com, .cos, .mes, but you can get like .sexy, .academy, .xyz is a new one, which is quite funny. They have all of those and they're all really well priced. But you can find out what is available very simply. You just go on to Hover.com. You just type in a keyword or a couple of words or a phrase and they will start building suggestions for you and showing you what's available and showing them to you at very low prices. For example, you can get .com domains at $12.99 now. They have recently lowered their prices on over the 200 domain options that they have available. And all of, see, one of the great things is you kind of end up saving so much money by using Hover because there's a bunch of stuff you don't have to buy, like who is privacy? Now, so many other registrars will make you pay for this. This is one of my favorite things about Hover. I mention it every time because I love it. I just think it's so important. So who is privacy, in case you don't know, when you buy a domain with a registrar, you have to put in a bunch of information that goes into the database of registration, to put it simply. So this stuff can all be asked for. So people can do what's called a who is search and they can get all of this information about you unless you have who is privacy enabled on your domain. Now, so many other registrars, I won't name names, but you can kind of guess, make you pay for this. They make you pay extra. Hover, enable it. By default, they just ask you, do you want it? If you say yes, they'll just put it on and it's free and you can enable it at any point. You can take it off at any point if you want to. But this is just something that I love. Hover, believe that your private information should stay private. And that's one of the things that I love about them. They have fantastic customer support. They have a no hold, no wait, no transfer telephone support policy. So if you have any issues, you've got any questions, you just call someone. You're going to get the answer from that person. They're going to help you because they're not going to transfer you around, bounce you around the call center. If you prefer to have robotic communication like me, you can email them. They're really great with their email support. They're very friendly, very nice, and they can help you, especially if you're in like another time zone like I am or on the other side of the world. They also have something called the valet service. So if you want to move from someone else, maybe you have like 25 domains with another registrar, well, they can take care of all of the hassle for you. You just tell them you want to move from here to here. They'll ask you some stuff. They'll ask you some bits and bobs you need to give them, and they will move all of it for you. This is going to be really difficult to do. I tried to do it once and locked a domain for like 6,000 years and I can't get it away, and it's just the worst. But Hover, know all of that. They know all the hoops that need to be jumped through, and they'll take care of it. And this is for free if you're transferring your domains to Hover. They have so much cool stuff. You should be trying them out. Go to Hover.com right now, and you want to use the code 1OVUS, or one word, at checkout. You'll get 10% off your first purchase at Hover.com with the code 1OVUS, and you'll be showing your support for the Pen Addict and Relay FM. Thank you so much to Hover for sponsoring this episode.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Thank you, Hover. I love Hover. They're great. I did transfer a bunch of domains over there a while ago. I didn't use the valet service, but it's simple enough to do on your own, and it was great.

'''Myke Hurley:''' They have guides as well if you want to do it yourself.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Definitely. I used all that. All right. So we have a pen blog of the week, and it's not exactly a blog, but rather a newsletter. My inbox was filled with people recommending the Pen Parade newsletter from Hallie Bateman. Yeah, Hallie Bateman. She's an artist in Brooklyn, and she did a newsletter release last week where she was talking about making this beautiful... I don't even know how to... She basically just says it right in the title. A pen that's a carrot dipped in ink. And that pretty much sold me right there. And I got my... So many people emailed me this link, and I want to give credit to Ross. Ross was the first one to send me the email. But you should all go check out Hallie Bates' Pen Parade newsletter. We'll have the link in the show notes. She looks like she releases one like every two weeks or so. They're really funny. She's hilarious. I've followed her on Twitter. She's really... She's got a good feed. So go check this out. Sign up. It's free. And you'll get crazy stuff that she does in your inbox every couple of weeks. So have you had a chance to check this out, Myke?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I've not even heard of it, but I will. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I had never heard of it until I got shown this, and it's really, really funny. Basically, pens don't have to be pens. A pen can be a carrot dipped in ink. Those are words to live by, Myke. Yes. Deep. Very deep. But I like it. It's funny. So good job, Hallie. And hopefully some people will check it out. So you snuck something in on me.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. What you got?

'''Myke Hurley:''' You've been up to some stuff. Well, Jeff probably has. I don't know if you've been.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yeah. Both. Mostly Jeff. But yeah. He gets all the... You know he gets all the credit.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I'm teasing you. I'm teasing you. So one is you've got some small batch cases at NotCo. Yeah. What are these?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So what we wanted to do was we like to... It's fun to experiment. And I think this came out of the Fodderstack Fall Festival when we had a bunch of people over at the shop in September and we did a little raffle for everyone who was there. And one of the raffle items was you got to make a case of your own. A Hightower case which is the three pin slot on the left side and the memo notebook pocket on the right side. You got to basically look at all of our materials and pick out, piece together all these parts that you wanted to put together in a case and we'll make it for you right there. And it was really cool. The guy who won, I'm blanking on his name right now. He just went through, he picked out all these random colors and it ended up looking awesome. It was just like this mashup of all these different colors and patterns and threads and things like that. So we got the idea to not quite go as far as he went with the randomness, but to use some of our fabrics and just put together some cases that we thought the colors match well or just something new to put out there. But maybe they're not necessarily going to be like a standard stock item. So we're not calling them limited or anything like that because they might end up, you know, if they do really well and get good feedback, you know, maybe we'll expand on them and make some more things like that. But we just basically it's kind of like our testing bed and we wanted to see what people like and get some feedback on some new colors and things like that. So, you know, it's just it's just us having fun with what we do and making some neat some neat cases to go along with it and offering them up for sale. So they've had really good feedback so far. So very happy with how it turned out.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Something I'm even more interested in. So there's a little post put on onto the NotCo blog, just new case designs. And you're kind of talking about the process that you go through when you're because you're working on something new right now. Right. We've spoken about it already. You're working on a folio of some description. Right. For sure. And in that post, there's a couple of links to some Instagram photos of different sort of layouts for the folio. I'm really interested in this like a lot.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, it's been fun like seeing what Jeff comes up with. You know, we've gone through several different designs of this folio style case right now. We haven't. We're nowhere near like locking it down and getting like the final production design ready. But it's been fun to play around with all these things. And I really like the direction it's headed and the style of the case. And what it's going to accomplish. I am really, really happy with that. Jeff, as I've mentioned before, is just a master experimenter. He can have an idea in his head scratched out onto a piece of paper and a case made like within an hour. It seems like he's just really, really good at that type of stuff. So I get all these pictures of all the time. Look what I did. I did this. What do you think? I'm like, man, this is great. So, yeah, it's just part of our thought process. Part of, you know, letting people in on the design process. Letting people know that it's not as easy as just stitching together a case and putting it up for sale. We want to do it right. And we like to get feedback from our customers and, you know, try to make a really, really good quality case that everyone's going to enjoy. So that was just part of the process behind it. So it was fun to put that out there. And, you know, you'll continue to see. We like getting feedback. And we like sharing, you know, what we're working on with everyone. Because it's fun. It's fun for us. It's fun for us to build these things and to talk about it. I mean, we love doing this. So it's just fun to be able to share these kinds of things.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I want to see if you can pry that Rotofarden out of my hands.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I've had a couple people mention that. Like, is this going to replace certain things for me? So we'll see. We'll have to see what we can do.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Jeff did reply to me from a Twitter account with that. Oh, okay. Okay, I will get that Rotofarden away from you. Oh, okay. That's what it was. Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Before we started the show today and we were prepping, I could hear this noise. It kind of sounded a little bit like this.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I don't know if you can hear that. Hang on. Yeah, you can hear it.

'''Myke Hurley:''' This is what I hear. I'm like, what are you doing? I was like, are you scribbling? And he's like, yeah. Yeah. I'm like, what are you doing? So tell me what you were doing.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I went to the post office while I was sleeping today. The doorbell rang and I couldn't drag myself out of bed, but I knew what it was. And so I woke up to a letter from the post office saying, hey, we have a package for you. And it was about an hour before we started recording. I was like, all right, I got time to run to the post office. Myke, you were actually like, hey, I can record a little early. I'm like, yeah, I'll be on a little early, but I'm going to run an errand real quick first. And you're like, okay, see you later.