Editing The Pen Addict 145/transcript (section)

== Apple Store Talk ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. Pens and stuff. So I'm talking about, Oh, one thing I will mention, I think we, did we speak about the Apple store event thing that I did on this show?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' You know, I said something once and you're like, Oh yeah, that was it.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. So I gave a talk at an Apple store a couple of weeks ago and, uh, the, the audio is now up, uh, on the iTunes store as of today. Um, I'll put that in the show notes as well. Um, so that's fun. I love, I love when I do these things. Cause I always talk about the pen addict as like an example of why you can have a podcast about anything.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, that's true. It's a weird never hurts.

'''Myke Hurley:''' That's a show title right there.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So, um, I did some weird this week myself. I, uh, I did something on a whim that had kind of had the seeds planted in my head for a long, long time. Since I've the last year or two of the pen addict, when things have kind of ramped up, people have been wanting to do, you know, have more of a community around it. And I've been asked, um, how about adding a forum to the pen addict? I've thought about it. I've looked at all kinds of forum database, all kinds of forum software, all kinds of setting it up. It just looked overwhelming to me. I didn't want to deal with the maintenance of it. I didn't want to deal with the, uh, issues that come along with those types of things. I didn't want to deal with the support, all that kind of mess. And earlier this week, or I don't even know what day it was late last week, the fountain pen geeks website went down and this all kind of ties in together. And I don't know anything about that. People are asking me about all that drama over there. I don't know Dan, Eric, anything about all that. So I don't even have any words to say about that. But what people were most upset about is the FP Geeks forum went down and people were really up in arms about not having that outlet. So they're still working through the issues with FP Geeks website, but they put the forum back online until they hash out their differences and get the website back to normal.

'''Myke Hurley:''' What do you mean hash out their differences? I'm fully away from this because I don't really, forums are just not really a thing that I'm, I've never been much of a person for.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So it didn't have anything to do with the forums. The whole, the overview of the FP Geeks thing, and they've changed the homepage now, is there's basically a power struggle between the two owners. Oh, that sucks. So one of them took it down, took down the site without the other one knowing. So that's the short version. Everything else, I don't know.

'''Myke Hurley:''' What a shame.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, so they're working it out. But anyway, they put the forum back up. But that made me think, again, about doing the pen addict forum stuff. And I still, I just don't want to deal with all that a forum entails. And since we've been using Slack for Relay, and we've been using Slack for Knock, I've gotten kind of used to that platform. And I didn't even cross my mind as something that would be useful for pen addict people. But I saw some other communities, like an Atlanta technology community, just have a Slack room with all these boards and like a thousand users. And they had all these different types of channels that you can talk in for different topics. And I was like, well, maybe this will work for the pen addict. So I literally just sat there one morning and created the Slack room, posted it out there, started sending out invitations. And it's been awesome. The feedback has been killer for this room. It's insane. It's insane. It is. You know, I think we're at about 100, it's somewhere between 150 and 180 users so far. There's channel topics you can talk in, like fountain pens, regular pens, paper, ink. There's a general channel. There's a place where you can sell stuff. There's a place where you can, I call it pimp yourself. You know, if you're a blogger or you make stuff, you can put stuff in there. I just want to, it's just this really, really fun community. And everyone's so kind and helpful. And the conversations, if you're a completionist, don't even, you need to file that away.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I just pop in a couple of times a day and just see what's happening. Like, I don't even really say much because I don't even know what to contribute. But it's fun. It's amazing that it's there and just happening all the time, you know?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So anyone who hasn't gotten in on this and is interested right now, I'm doing all the invitations manually. So all you need to do is get in touch with me, Twitter, email, whatever.

'''Myke Hurley:''' If you want, there are tools that can allow for automatic sign up.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yes, I need to look in that. I just haven't, I've done some basic searches on that, but I haven't done anything yet. So right now I'm doing it the hard way, but that's okay. It's worked out well. I'm getting everyone in within a day of when they send me their email address and send them an invite. It's really, really fun. It's a great community. It's been fun to watch the banter that's going back and forth in all the rooms. And, you know, it's, someone asked me to, several, a lot of people don't know what Slack is and they asked me to explain it. I mean, on its own, it's basically, it's a collaboration tool really made, designed for workplaces. But it's built in such a way that you can use it as a community platform. And in this case of the pen addict, I related it to like the bar, the neighborhood bar down in the corner. You know, the unfortunate cheers reference where everybody knows your name. You walk in any time of day. It's open 24 seven, pull up to the bar, barkeep will pour you a drink, ask you what's going on. And you can just talk about pens. It's just really, really cool. It's so easy. It's just simple, nothing to it. And, you know, I've already had a lot of great feedback on it. So if you're interested in that, definitely get in touch. So I posed a question, Myke, in the general forum today, that's kind of relevant to what we've already talked about in opening this show. So what are you most interested in this week? The Apple Watch event or the new Fields Nodes release, which should be tomorrow?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Well, I mean, now I'm really interested in a new Fields Nodes release.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' But it was before it was the Apple Watch. You're pretty jacked about the Apple Watch. Well, yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I mean, that's I love pens.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's your thing. That's your thing.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But it's pens are my second thing.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I hear you. They're like my mistress or something. You know, it's the thing that I like to do that I don't tell anybody about.