Weekly 2018-06-18: Success, Graph, Bday and a surprise.

Hi Patrons! Today is my birthday and I'm really happy it sync with a weekly report. 

The surprise

Last week, while future episode 26 storyboard was still in a proof-reading process, I decided to jump on a big item on my Todo list, one that was around for a long time and a surprise for the Pepper&Carrot reader: an official e-shop! 

(picture: an autogenerated mock-up from the e-shop service, showing a P&C sticker on a tablet)

It took me long time to find information on how to make it work for my legal and administrative status (to declare taxes, and all) because administration here still think the world like 50 years ago: an artist is still supposed working in workshop on pure original and signed creation and can't manage a shop at the same time. But with Internet this practice is now so common! So, it is always hard to fill new habit/lifestyle into old statuses. But I could find a mixture of thing to make it work.

Where it is? The e-shop is still to young to publish the final URL and spread it everywhere. Right now, you'll find only the logo on it anyway. Not really cool. So, I prefer to open it officially when the catalog will be a bit more creative. As I'm using an external service (it will be Redbubble), I'll need a bit of integration on the official website. 

I'm not looking at this project in a hope of a new source of support; but more as a service to offer printing of goodies and fun objects. It will be fun!

(the "Paw of Authenticity", an idea of adding a little signature especially for products coming from the official e-shop, because everyone can already print and sell Pepper&Carrot artworks) 

Success, graphics, CPU and server

Meanwhile I was busy on the e-shop, I got hit by a reality: the average audience of peppercarrot.com website is now around 15 000 readers a day! (Out of period of new episode release or new blog-post). While this stat is awesome and a cool sign of growing success of the series; it is also a source of new problems. The web host of peppercarrot.com warned me two time by email that the website was frozen because exceeding the resources. CPU overloads, and various excess in bandwith. So it was necessary to review the code of the website (available here) and optimize it before having a broken access or worst: getting kicked by the host. I could receive precious advices from the pepper&carrot IRC channel and then I started to apply the optimizations on Friday. I mainly refused access of "search robots" to certain pages and cached more the things that needed constant regenerating (mainly the thumbnails of the website). As you can see on the graphic above: the CPU usage of the server is now more calm and does less spikes (website was totally frozen during this spikes). On long term, I'll upgrade the server capacity and continue to optimize other area of the code. 

Conclusion

So, in the end I was a bit sad to have spent a week in administrative task, eshop, website optimization and planning the future. But for sure I'll have other week non-artistic like that in the future.

Thank you again for reading, and for your continuous support on my work; that's the best present an artist can get <3