Winding down for now

Time for a third update after the site transition. The biggest change you've likely noticed is that Piperka redirects you to use the HTTPS version of the site. There's no reason to not use it in this time and age, to better protect your settings. Setting that up wasn't quite that straightforward since there is one page on Piperka that needs to stay as HTTP. The iframe embedding that Reader does is not possible if the host page is HTTPS and the embedded page is HTTP and that makes it necessary to use HTTP instead. To make the reader page communicate with HTTPS with the rest of Piperka, I had to add something called CORS headers to the responses. It all added to complexity and I had to get it right or I would have risked blocking people from Piperka or even permanently redirecting their browsers to someone else's web page. But it all seems to work and I guess it's all right.

Another thing that I've done is to fix Piperka's side for the Android App. I'm hoping I did, I don't use it myself. The rest are smaller feature fixes, like fixing the link from another user's profile page to the map and correctly loading their selections to view. And there was an off by one error with the quick search function. I was actually told about it soon after the site transition but when I looked at it I saw another off by one error with the links to jump to a letter on the browse page and only ended up fixing that even though it was a separate issue. I only gave it a real fix when I got a second bug report about it, sorry about it.

Speaking of Piperka Map, I'm aware that it hasn't had an update for a long time. There's a daily data dump that makes the map calculating program segfault and I still haven't taken the time to figure out a fix for it. As the map compute is set up, doing it for a day requires the previous day's map, to align the comics to be as close to each other as possible, from day to day. I could have just jumped over the offending day but I'd rather fix it properly. Even though it's been that way for a long time now. At least there's good chance that it will be soon now, though it'll still take weeks to catch up, computing each missing daily map up to today.

There was a bug with using Piperka's bookmarking with a bookmarklet. I don't think there's currently any instructions for how to make one anywhere on Piperka. When I reintroduce it I'll make it so that you get a personal bookmarklet to use that makes making bookmarks a single stage process without that annoying CSRF confirmation check.

I've added a page about Supporting Piperka. I was more comfortable with setting it up so that the link to it on the side bar is visible only to logged in users. It might have been a better move if I wanted to maximize donations to simply offer a link to Patreon but I rather wanted to give an explanation on why I recommend Liberapay as an alternative. At the risk of making people read words. Don't get me wrong, it's okay if you use Patreon and I'm grateful if you do. It's okay if you never use either, as well.

Blog posts have been a weekly feature this month but there likely won't be one next week. I'm taking a mini vacation next weekend. Don't hold it against me if I still add some comics or fix crawler issues but I'll stay away from any feature development.