New Years sale, twitter, and a poll...

Kicking off the new year, I've got some special things coming this month. For starts, here's two of them.

Firstly, I've got to once again clear out my stock/inventory of pens! If you know me, then you'll know that means a big sale for you all! :) It's time to save big this January on all those pens you didn't get for Christmas. Each pen has a nice discount on the price for this month only. I say grab them while you can, because you won't find them cheaper, and because I seriously need to clear out!



Then I'll have room for all the great pens of 2012 - can't wait to see what pops up.

For this special sale I've included an extra mini tray with a few pens on it that wouldn't fit on the other one. There are some real beauties this month, and at steal prices too! Among my favorites are:

• A Lovely near mint Sheaffer Defender (military clip)
• A pristine Vacumatic Major (emerald - just beautiful!)
• A Parker Duofold Jr.
• An Eversharp skyline in blue, with a GF cap 
• And a whole lot more that are worth mentioning, but I won't anyways. :)

Check out the sale here!

Now, for the second little update: I have decided to give twitter one last chance. I realized that there are a LOT of people who can be easily reached via twitter, but who are never on FaceBook, and wouldn't normally visit the blog. This opens up a very large door of opportunity for sharing the fountain-pen-fun with even more people! We'll see how it goes, but I think twitter is around to stay. I finally found an iOS app that really works, so twitter is a much more "smooth/streamlined" experience for me now. It's actually a bit of fun.

So, for the twitter-connected crowd, follow me at TylersPens!




A few minor things worth mentioning:

• Some of you may have noticed something wrong with the blog yesterday at around 6:00PM-8:30PM (Central Time). I was trying to beta test bloggers new dynamic templates, but for some reason they actually got published! Big mistake. I've learned my lesson - I'll have a test blog set up for stuff like this in the future.
• On that note - the blog will NOT be changing looks anytime soon. While the new blogger templates are beautiful, minimalistic, and well designed, but they lack key features to me. Most importantly the great DISQUS commenting system currently implemented on the blog, among other things...
• I am considering in the late future however, a change over to a full blog, without the ".blogspot" extension. Again - think late future, like, maybe not even this year.
• The mobile website - yes it still exists, but I got caught up with life and it got pushed to the back burner. I apologize to all my wonderful volunteers, and to everyone who's been waiting so long. Now with the blogs re-merged, I am freed up to begin work again! I am re-working the design just a bit,after thinking about usability, convenience, etc. Hopefully the end result will be a highly usable mobile website!

That being said, I'd like your opinion, reader of my blog. If you'd be so kind as to just participate in this poll, I'd be most appreciative! Here are my two options for the mobile website design (click the images for a larger version): 

#1 - The original design. It's very simple, but my common problem is that the text bubbles don't look like clickable buttons, even though they are. Aside from that, it is also very feature heavy (as the navigation goes deeper). Feature heavy that is for a mobile site.

#2 - Just came up with this last night. It's a very quick mock-up (rough around the edges still!) but it's a much more "native" looking website. It should be much more "instantly familiar" with mobile users than the previous site.

That's about it for my new years updates. :) I'll stop talking now and get back to my work. I've got inks and pens to be reviewed, articles to write, and pens to be restored. Have a great evening everybody!

Regards,

Tyler Dahl