Piperka blog

Teksti

I'm announcing a new site: Teksti. The name's the Finnish word for "text" and it's pronounced like "texty". It's just like Piperka but this time it's for web fiction. In fact, they share the same user database and if you have an account on one then you have one on the other as well. It's got only a few web fictions listed on it so far but feel free to submit more.

People tend to try to submit web fictions to Piperka from time to time. While their format is generally quite suitable for Piperka, I've skipped them since they, well, aren't web comics. I thought that I could still do something about them and it felt more natural to have them on their own site instead of sectioning them somehow within Piperka. I'm not sure what I'm getting into but that didn't stop me from coming up with Piperka either. I'm not going to try to index just any random forums that people may use to write their novels to.

I plan to add SSO between the two sites later on. For now, you'll need to log in to both, separately. Another upcoming feature would be to unify their updates pages, to list bookmarks from both sites on it.

On the technical side, I used PostgreSQL's schemas to duplicate the comic tables for both sites, leaving the account specific bits to the public schema. The site logic was duplicated within a snaplet which embeds both of them and most of the templates are shared, with the one splicing in "comic" and the other "web fiction" where appropriate. Both sites even share the same backend process.

Not much else to tell about it. It's pretty much just a "brown Piperka".

Other things I've been doing since the last post include doing a time lapse animation of Piperka Map over the last 6 years. It may not quite be what'd move the site forward but I was curious to see what it would look like and I had a few bugs in my code that I wanted to fix and needed to do a fair amount of runs to narrow them down. I may have entertained the idea of having a fraction of the DataIsBeautiful community like my animation and perhaps having a fraction of them end up sign up for Piperka. But that didn't happen. Playing with data is fun, I wish I had more of it.

I was a bit worried about seeing my ad revenue decrease by switching over to Comic Ad Network, but turns out that it's been on par with what I had previously. I'm not sure how they do that since PW was never that good. Though what I get from there pretty much relies on individual advertisers and it may drop from time to time, when campaigns expire. Piperka's been at the top of their by earnings rankings for much of the time so it's not like I have anything to complain about. Thanks to all of you who've ran ads on Piperka so far, hopefully you've got your money's worth out of it.

I hope that everyone's doing okay. Having a pandemic going on makes it feel like all the news are like from a science fiction novel. My area's not been hit that hard, at least not yet. Most everything's been canceled and anywhere I go there are just a few people around and they are staying well apart from each other. Even more so than what Finns are prone to, usually. So stay at home and read some web comics. Or web fiction, as well.

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 16:13:07 UTC