Whither Piperka

Let me tell you a story. There was a stone and a pot. And everyone was well fed by the stone soup. I may have skipped over a bit.

Let me talk about motivation, that is, mine, and let me talk about Piperka. I've been running it for over eight years now, which is a long time for doing anything. In many ways, it remains the same that it was from the start, the basic idea was there from the beginning and much of what I have been doing since has been auxiliary stuff or refinements. Besides the ever-so-present need for fixing crawler issues and adding a few thousand comics.

My motivation matters since I'm the only person behind Piperka and nothing much happens unless I do it. And it's not anything as simple as turning a profit, either. I had aspirations of commercial success when I started doing it, but that idea has been laid aside along the years. It's been a great way to practise my coding skills and accumulate proof of thereof. It has helped me get jobs. I can use it to explore techniques that I wouldn't have the opportunity for at my day job. I've been doing it for fun, and out of curiosity to see how people would react, and sometimes in anticipation of positive reviews.

It's been a fun ride, but right now I'm in a bit of an impasse. I've seen less progress last year than what I'd like. I changed jobs a year ago (to a much nicer one) and moved to a city where I can have a social life, again. Both of which have made me to neglect Piperka. I've had less time and when I've had it, I haven't necessarily felt like touching Piperka. Yet I'm not about to abandon Piperka, if only because I use it myself and I couldn't imagine reading web comics without, or with someone else's software. It's frustrating, seeing how Piperka could be better but feeling like I'm being the bottleneck, preventing that from happening.

I've tried. Build and they come, they say. I released Piperka's source code when it became feasible and I convinced myself to take the leap, inviting people to participate, and that's gone nowhere. One thing that I should have done already back then would be to arrange some other point of communication besides emailing me, personally. I've set up a public development mailing list, feel free to join to say what you'd like to see fixed or improved, or just follow along. A blog is fine for (sadly, infrequent) announcements but I hope that a mailing list would lend itself to a more open discussion.

So far, Piperka's story hasn't been that of the stone soup. It's been all me. I could have tried to commercialize it, but that's not the route that I wanted to try to take. I could have made look all serious and rename it as something less whimsical, as something that actually had something to do with web comics, but I didn't want to. Piperka's quirky and odd and so personal that there are days when I feel like taking it down just to avoid having others look at it, and I like it that way. I'm not sure how trying to get others to participate in running a web site would even work. I can release the source code but there will still be only one Piperka, which I control. That's something I can't even try to meaningfully change before the support would be there.

I'll say a few words about Piperka's crawler, comic updates and the database, to give a picture of what's involved in trying to share the burden of maintenance. It's about the plumbing, the hidden part which becomes visible only when it doesn't work properly. I take users' privacy seriously and that alone means that I'm not giving direct access to the database to anyone. I could, in principle, strip it of user data and make the crawler code contained in there available for people, in hopes that I would receive help in maintaining it. I'm not going to do it at this time. First off, I need to be convinced first that releasing the web site's source code was a good idea, even, before I release even more. I don't want to do it only to see nobody care. Maintaining it is unglorious janitorial work which even I find too much like work at times, and I don't expect people to jump in for that. Beyond that, there's the same problem I had with regard to the source code itself. If I made a dump of the data and someone improved on it, then there would be no easy way for someone to send me the fix, nor for me to accept the changes. It doesn't live in a version control system but in a database, and the web comics' archives it tries to reflect is quite an ephemeral bunch. Beyond that, it's not just a matter of fixing the comic archive index, but there are ways that the data is tied to users' settings. For example, when a page needs to be removed from Piperka's index, all the bookmarks need to be bumped down by one page to reflect the change. One future development plan I have is to allow users make annotations on a comic's archive page and that'd only make it more necessary to consider user data when updating the comic data.

What I'd really need to improve on Piperka's crawler would be a better user interface for the maintenance work. I do it all currently on a shell on the server, calling scripts to invoke the crawler or update the database directly via SQL queries. It works and updating a comic, on a comic per comic basis, doesn't usually take all that long. But it could be improved on, and all that effort does add up. I would have saved the time used for that many times over, had I used the time to build a better user interface for the work. There would be another benefit, too, if I had the interface: It would enable me to hand over parts of the maintenance to others.

Ultimately, this is a question of what kind of a site Piperka is. In a sense, its purpose is to stay out of the way. Nobody visits Piperka to see Piperka itself, but to get to read the web comics. But how does it do that, how does it present itself to people and who's working on it behind the scenes. I find myself unsatisfied with how the answers to these stand now, and I'd like to see that change. To put it simply, I want to make running Piperka feel like fun again.