Write on, all ye fountain pen lubbers!

Welcome to the You Have Writes! web site. This is intended as a place for fountain pen geeks to gather. This is not intended to replace long-standing communities like The Fountain Pen Network or FPGeeks (hence the lack of a traditional forum -- though I am willing to entertain the idea of setting one up!); rather , this is intended as more of a social network that is specific to the fountain pen community. You can think along the lines of Facebook (general social network) and Instagram (photo-sharing social network), except running entirely on open source software and ran by a guy who loves fountain pens and cares about privacy. There is also an instant messaging service and a wiki (though the wiki needs to be filled in - like, a LOT).

Currently, this site plays host to the following services:

Announcements

01 July 2023

For some time, I have not been paying as much time as I should to this site. As a result, I have not been keeping web services up-to-date like I should. Anyone who works in computer security can tell you that updates are important to keeping things secure, so now that I have dedicated some time to work on things, I have been trying to get web services up-to-date. Pixelfed in particular has been a challenge to work on.

For non-technical folks, I will simply say that I am dropping support for Pixelfed due to compatibility issues between my server's operating system and newer versions of Pixelfed.

For technical folks that want the details, newer versions of Pixelfed require PHP 8.1 or newer, which is not available on Devuan 4.x "Chimaera" (the operating system on my server). Once Devuan 5.0 "Daedalus" comes out with PHP 8.x support, I can consider reinstating Pixelfed; I will need to hold off on updating until I can be confident that Friendica and MediaWiki will work on PHP 8.x as those (and the Jabber chat service) are the main services provided here.

24 June 2023

I recently decided to peform an upgrade to my server -- one that required me to do a backup-and-restore of services -- and discovered that my backup scripts only partially covered my jabber service. Unfortunately, too much was lost to fully recover the jabber service, so anyone who previously registered for a jabber chat account will need to re-register.

All other services have been fully restored. In doing the restoration, I discovered that all services had their e-mail settings misconfigured. I am a bit confused as to how that happened as e-mail worked on all services when I registered my accounts. Good news is, I managed to get e-mail working properly again. If you registered an account somewhere and did not receive your activation e-mail, request a password reset; if this does not work, e-mail contact@youhavewrites.net with the service you are having trouble with (Friendica, Pixelfed, or Wiki), your user name, and the e-mail address you registered with (do not include the password you wish to use!) and I will try to get things working for you.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience the aformentioned issues have cause anyone.

I would consider hosting the following if there is significant interest: