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Piperka is good enough…I am still lamenting the demise of Comic Alert!. I still want to get an open source peering comic tracker out there. In the meantime, some friends pointed me at Piperka with the comment that it's "good enough". Having tried it, I must agree with both the letter and the spirit of that sentiment… Piperka is not perfect. Its layout, organization, search, and general feel are inferior to that of Comic Alert! But there's no point in crying over spilt milk—if you want final evidence of CA's demise, just keep in mind that xkcd is still "pending" on CA, 6 months after I requested it. xkcd! Piperka does have some great points. Perhaps the best: their team is currently responsive. I requested a couple of webcomics when I first signed up: they appeared within hours. One thing I didn't expect to like about Piperka is that it is webpage-based rather than RSS-based. It turns out that the ability to pick up where I left off from a different machine is great, and far outweighs having to hit an extra link. All in all, I recommend Piperka to keep track of a reasonable-sized troll of comics.
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Thanks, I find Piperka good enough myself too
Basically, Piperka was and still is a solution for the problem of getting to read web comics the way I like, regardless of having it run on a publicly accessible server. I wouldn't settle for anything less than good enough.
Though my idea of usable might lead to ugly layout, and I might not always appreciate the deficiencies regarding organization and search since I can always log in and do SQL queries and whatnot.
I'm hoping that people'd rather read webcomics than watch the blinkenlichts on Piperka, as long as it works well enough.
I guess I've given a bit of misleading information at places on Piperka, since I'm alone behind most of it and am responsible for its maintenance. I've given moderator access to the descriptions' modifications and banner submission queue to a couple of friends, but that's about it.
Heh, people seem to remember to always mention the "having a comic added within hours" thing when they blog about Piperka. What can I say? I have no life and I spend most of my time at home, sitting in front of my computer.
Oh, and regarding open source... I'm currently (supposed to be) busy writing my master's thesis, but I've been planning to give a major overhaul to Piperka after I'm done with that. That is, in a few weeks. I think it's clear by now that I won't turn in a profit from controlling access to the code running on Piperka, from ad revenues, no matter what I do. I must admit that I wished for something like that happen when I started making Piperka. Silly me.
Besides, I feel that I'm being part of the problem as long as what I do ends up being proprietary software. At least I'm not asking people to run inscrutable binary blobs on their computers.
Anyway, I'm going to start a rewrite of the web server part of Piperka (using HAppS instead of the current apache+mason framework), using a public repository from day one. Having the new code talk to the database and do the same things that the current code does to generate the web pages is the first goal. It remains to be seen what I'll do about the comic tracking side of the site after that, but it could turn out to be anything up to and including turning it into a p2p comic tracking framework.
Thanks for your comments, and for a cool service
Re-reading my comments on Piperka, I think I understated a bit how happy I am with it. Thanks much for a great free service that fills a really truly important niche for me and my friends.
If you want help with the open source Haskell version of Piperka (awesome!) I'm sure my students and I will be happy to pitch in. I think there'll still be opportunities for you to make solid money from your SW after it is open sourced; I can maybe help you with that a bit too.
Oh, and good luck with your thesis! I wrote one of those once; they're a pain, but it's great when it's done. Make sure you let us know so that we can read and enjoy!
Again, thanks for Piperka.
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