Piperka blog

Next step, Android

First off, a couple of notes about monetization. I promise I'm not trying to annoy you with it. I've added Google's AdSense ads as an opt in feature. They're not the kind of ads I'd really want for Piperka so I'm not making them a default, but since they were pretty quick to add (along with the code to not show them) I went with them. Enable them if you don't mind them and don't feel bad if you don't.

I've joined Piperka to Brave's verified site program. If you don't use their browser then this doesn't concern you in any way. If you like, use this referral link and install and use it and I may earn some of their BAT. It's a privacy oriented browser but I can't vouch for it personally as I'm not a user.

I didn't post anything about it on the blog at the time but I released Piperka client for Sailfish a bit over month ago. My goal for May is to port it to Android. I've already got that far with it to get the C++ portion of the client to run on it with some very basic QML layout, which is already quite a lot since the compiled code does most of the heavy lifting. I'm afraid it won't look as pretty as the Sailfish version, at least at first. Their QML objects were opinionated and I could line my app pretty well along their assumptions and as a result I got quite a few things for free for my app. I'm happy with the reception I've got there so far. It's a small platform so the volume was never going to be that big but it did okay, considering.

I had some unplanned service outage on 2nd of April. The whole data center where Piperka's hosted was offline for some 7 hours. I've been toying with the idea of moving Piperka to a fault tolerant distributed cluster with a hot spare node ever since. Some would say that it would be overkill for a site like Piperka and it could come with possible new modes of failure of its own. But it's not a near term thing, either way.

I made a new small addition to sort types. Sort by new subscriptions shows the comics which have gained and lost readers recently. The data is refreshed daily after the readers count history data collection. It's something I've been wishing to keep track of myself and there was no reason not to make it available for everyone to see as well.

After the Android app I'm thinking of doing further improvements to the crawler. I've outlined some of the things I could be doing with it earlier on this blog. Just the kinds of things that you'd never see or notice if they work as they should.

I suppose I was a bit exhausted after getting the Jolla app published and haven't had much focus in April. I expect to pick up the pace again.

Wed, 01 May 2019 07:28:14 UTC