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If you’re one of the folks addicted to the Fountain Pen Network, and you don’t know what to do while the site is down as they migrate to a new server, I just wanted to remind you of the unofficial pen chatroom.  We’re in ##penfiends on irc.freenode.net if you know IRC, or you can simply go to our chat page, which will pipe you right in from the web site, no special stuff needed!

Yep, I delivered as promised.  The site has left its Drupal origins, and I’ve migrated to Wordpress.  I’m much more familiar with this, and should be able to do more with it.  Maybe.  At any rate, it’s more reliable and looks a ton better, in my humble opinion.  I’d love to hear thoughts from you all, what you think of the change, and all that jazz.

And don’t forget, the wiki is still absolutely alive and well, and just awiting for you all to start contributing!  I urge you all to get going!  I know I’ve been MIA for a while, but I promise I’m getting some time in my schedule that I’m going to start building a lot more content again in the wiki.  I’m even wanting to take on a couple people who might be interested in writing a couple blogs a month for the site on things like pens, repair, how-tos, writing examples, ink sampling, just about anything and everything.  Please, by all means contact me if you think this would interest you.

Well, I must apologize for the lack of attention that Penpedia has been getting from me lately.  I assure you that I have a million great excuses.  Hopefully you are making good use of it, regardless.  I know recently we’ve been having some problems regarding the speed and downtime of the site.  This is an issue with the host that I am in the process of resolving… by moving to a better, more robust host.  When this is done, I’ll also be changing the front end of the site.  As good as Drupal is as a CMS, I’m much fonder of Wordpress, so I’m doing some work to make that change happen seamlessly without downtime.  This shouldn’t pose a huge issue to any of you, aside from the layout changing.  The wiki side of the site won’t be changing at all.

As you might have noticed, there have been some changes on deck. Congratulations to Rachel Ayers and John Shackelford for their entries in the logo design contest. You can see their handiwork here and in the wiki now. This is the first part of what will be a gradual theme evolution, to give Penpedia more of its own identity, rather than a canned layout. No, I have no clue where it’s going yet, but I think it will look good. I’m clever, after all.

I also updated our navigation some. Wiki links are now immediately to the left, so you can jump right in there. Plus there are more of them now, to facilitate easier finding of information. The top nav bar was also rearranged to accommodate the altered side navigation. Nothing major, but it is different onw. The user profiles have all been updated, and now have more fields and areas to put neat little info about yourselves. I am happy to hear ideas for additional fields, so feel free to use our contact form to send those recommendations our way.

Stay tuned, as we will also have reports from the Michigan pen show in a few days in case you weren’t able to go. Should be neat. I’m also arranging for news from the NY/NJ show as well. Good stuff!

With Penpedia now in full beta testing (I did get the RSS feed problem fixed!), it is time to start focusing on the look and feel. To begin the process, I thought this a good chance to do some community building. With incentive, naturally.

So, here’s the game. Two ways to win. The contest is two pronged. The first way to win is design a logo for Penpedia. The second way is to design a fancy header incorporating the Penpedia name. The two may end up combined for the web site header later, and used separately where applicable across the site. What’s it worth? Two fancy bottles of Noodler’s ink: Purple Wampum and La Coleur Royale. The winner of the logo contest gets first choice, the header will get the other. Read more

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