New code, new server, next weekend

I've had a pretty intense couple of weeks of coding. I thought it would be a week but just when I was finishing up at the end of it, I discovered that I still missed the code for processing comic info page edits and new comic submissions. I certainly was thinking of it earlier but it had slipped my mind since. Nor was account creation via the usual route of giving a user name and password working. So I had another week of pretty intense coding evenings.

The new server is live! Go poke at it at. I'll allow a week for testing but that'll become the new Piperka next weekend. It's running a fairly recent snapshot of the database and anything done on it will be reset on transition. It's not running the crawler yet and it's not getting any comic updates. Go create users and click on things and tell me when you run into issues. I'll rather fix them now instead of after it's in production. I trust that the code is in a good enough state to not blatantly leak any user data.

The backend code is all new. The first time you log in there's a longer delay as it generates a new cryptographic hash for you. When the transition occurs, old sessions should still work transparently. Or even now if you set the cookie manually. I expect to have the site down for less than half an hour when the transition happens.

The outward changes are all pretty minor. The updates page had display options on it but I moved all those over to the account page. I added more sort options for the updates page. As of this writing, the new server's not yet set up to send email and you can't ask it to reset your password. The comic info pages are still missing related and subscription history sections. I'll be using this week for fixing any bugs I find and for adding any still missing things.

I've been so long at this that I'm almost at a loss at this point. I've had variable amounts of time and energy to give to the project but that's just the way it is with a side project like Piperka. I know that some comics are missing updates as I've been giving my main attention to the rewrite. I'm not promising immediate improvement on that front as I have further development goals now, which include improving the crawler and its management interface. But I have more time to give to Piperka from now on and some of that will be on site maintenance. Be that it is still more laborous than what it needs to be.

Expect to see new things soon.