Blog

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…more

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…more

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…more

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…more

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…more