Blog

This is why we can't have nice things. 😢

It recently came to my attention that there were spam accounts in FPC. They used the public profile page to post spam. I’ve now tightened the checks on that feature a bit (more to come) and removed almost 300 accounts, yesterday. I’ll try to keep any eye on it from now on and hopefully I’ll keep the upper hand without having to resort to more drastic measures (like disabling links in profile pages).

New pen and ink suggestion widget. Now with AI™️

I never thought I’d be writing this, but FPC is now part of the hype train and (proudly?) uses AI! But in my defense I have to say that I found a good (decent?) use of it.

Now, when you want to get a suggestion for what pen and ink combination to use, it not only gives you one, but it also gives you a (possibly made up) reason for it! And when you’re happy with it, just click the button and get started.

widget screenshot another widget screenshot third widget screenshot fourth widget screenshot

First steps towards pen clustering

Over the last weeks (months?) I have been hard at work on the pens clustering. Right now only the inks get clustered into a public (and somewhat cleaned up) list, with reviews, descriptions, leaderboards, and sharing of colors and tags. Eventually, the pens will receive the same treatment. Obviously, this is a big task and it will still take a while to complete, however you can already have a look at the pens by popularity leaderboard to see the first signs of this. It’s not complete (still over 6000 pen clusters to manually look through 😰), but it is getting there!

New columns for the pens

Pens have always been treated a bit as an afterthought here on FPC. There really isn’t much you can do with them apart from pairing them with an ink for a currently inked entry. But this is about to change!

As a first step there are now four new columns: Material, trim color, filling system, and price.

pens table

These columns will automatically show up when you start filling them in:

pens edit form

Alternatively, you can use the selector to show the permanently.

selector

This is only the start, though! Just like inks are clustered, have reviews, descriptions, and so on, so will pens. It’s a bit of a bigger undertaking than just adding a few columns, but it will happen soon(ish).

Tags tags tags!

Often times it’s hard to search for inks. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to search for green inks, or inks that are wet? Sadly, that’s a super hard problem to solve, but there’s a way to get part way there. And that’s via tags! It has been possible to tag your inks for a long time already, but that data was never exposed and aggregated for everyone to use. That has changed now! Now you can search for green or wet.

Obviously, as tags haven’t been in use much, so not that many people have added tags, yet. My hope is that now that this is more useful, more people will add them and make them more useful.

ink list with tags

Speeding up the site

The last few months have been super busy for me and I didn’t really have time for FPC. At the same time, the site has grown substantially, which is of course great! There are almost 6000 users, that have added over 400,000 inks and roughly 120,000 pens! Add to that all the other features, and it might not be a surprise that the site has gotten slower. So much so, that it’s become problematic and without some work, the site would start breaking, soon!

Luckily, I now have more time to devote to this and I’ve spent the last days on speeding up the slowest part of the site. That includes the ink search, the public brands page, as well as all the data that’s being displayed on the dashboard. I will continue monitoring this and maybe pick a few pages that are too slow to my linking.

After that I will of course continue working on FPC and I’ll get back to adding new features.

Descriptions for brands and inks

We just made it possible for any logged in user to add or edit a description for an ink brand (e.g. Akkerman or a specific ink (e.g. Pelikan Edelstein Amethyst). There’s no concrete idea, yet, of what information should go into these descriptions, so feel free to add anything you think is relevant!

Introducing FPC: The Fountain Pen Capybara

The design of the site has been long in the tooth and I’ve been wanting to redo this for a long time. This will be a super long process, but the first step has been done. Introducing FPC: The Fountain Pen Capybara!

fountain pen capybara

Design by the amazing Angela He.

Visualise your inks!

Today’s update is a rather small one. I’ve added a new widget to the dashboard that let’s you see all the ink colors in your collection in one go. Thanks to Alan for the idea and for letting me add it to the site.

visualization

New features for the dashboard

It doesn’t look like much (and it isn’t), but the dashboard has received an update. Here’s a screenshot of how it looks for me. More details on the changes below:

Screenshot of the new dashboard
  1. It now shows pie charts with statistic around your inks and pens. Right now it only shows the data grouped by brand, but there’s more to follow!
  2. For those with slower internet connections: Only the data that is currently visible is loaded.

And that’s it for today! It doesn’t look like much, but there were many more changes done in the background that should make it much easier to add more statistics around your collection to that page in the future. Stay tuned!

I’ll leave you with a quick video of how that page looks for me when I load it.

Behind the scenes at FPC headquarters

As a first post on this new blog I wanted to take the time to let you all know what goes on behind the scenes at FPC (almost) every day. The thing is that the list of brands and inks doesn’t just magically appear, this is a process where some manual work is necessary.

Let’s for example look at the ink page for Akkerman #24 Zuiderpark Blauw-Groen:

Akkerman #24 Zuiderpark Blauw-Groen

In the lower half you can see that there are many names people have used for this ink, but I want to make sure that they are all combined into one entry so that the ink autocomplete is nicer (it only includes the most popular name for each ink), color values get applied to all entries, the ink leaderboard works, and the system also needs this when you compare your list of inks with someone else. There’s more features that will take advantage of this data set, but for these are the most important ones.

Unfortunately this process of combining inks can’t be fully automated. The naming conventions people use are just too different, and sometimes there are just multiple names for inks (especially Japanese ones) and no algorithm can do this. So whenever someone enters an ink that isn’t a match to one that is already in the system (there are some minor cleanups happening, like stripping out spaces and making everything lowercase) I get an email and I go into the admin interface, which then looks like this:

admin interface for ink matching

The part above the thick black bar is the ink (or inks as in this case there are multiple that the system has already pre-clustered) that the system doesn’t know what to do with. I can the assign it to an already existing ink using the “assign” button or I can create a new ink. There’s some clever sorting going on to move the most likely candidates to the top of the list, but there is also a search functionality for the cases where the correct entry has a completely different name. In the example shown above I would assign to the first existing entry, but for the example below I might create a new entry:

admin interface monteverde pink

On any given day there are somewhere between 5 and maybe 20 entries to look at, but of course I first had to go through all 19k entries (!) and that took me a while. The most important thing to note however is that I’m sure I’ve made quite a few mistakes when I grouped (or didn’t group) some of the entries. So if you find a mistake, use the “report an error” button on the ink page and let me know!