The Glowfic Constellation

Do you have a setting, character, plot, art, or other notion that you wish to put on the Internet? This is the Internet! Whee!
User avatar
pedromvilar
Posts: 1172
Joined: Sun Mar 23, 2014 11:48 am
Pronouns: *shrug*
Contact:

Re: The Glowfic Constellation

Post by pedromvilar »

Seconding Kappa

Also apparently the paypal thing isn't available in Brazil
Kappa
Posts: 3554
Joined: Fri Mar 21, 2014 5:47 pm
Pronouns: 'He' or 'she', interchangeably
Location: under a pile of Jokers
Contact:

Re: The Glowfic Constellation

Post by Kappa »

I've seen a scattering of accidental double posts lately.

Not sure whether the problem itself is fixable site-side, but does reply deletion still delete everything after the deleted reply? Because it seems like it would be really hard to deal with double posts after the fact if that's true.
User avatar
Timepoof
Posts: 488
Joined: Sun Nov 29, 2015 6:16 pm
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Location: On a sparkly throne with soft fluffy cushions
Contact:

Re: The Glowfic Constellation

Post by Timepoof »

Hee, thanks :D
The WAFFLES will submit to this indignity.
Marri
Posts: 1026
Joined: Mon Mar 31, 2014 7:47 am

Re: The Glowfic Constellation

Post by Marri »

Shame, Paypal. Shame. (Paypal not in the context of paypal.me is pretty international; I can provide my Paypal email upon request. And will look into a better way to do this.)

Reply deletion still does the thing. I will put turning it off on the list.
Marri
Posts: 1026
Joined: Mon Mar 31, 2014 7:47 am

Re: The Glowfic Constellation

Post by Marri »

Sorry if you saw application errors this morning; best guess based on logs is the memory usage got in a weird state, restarted the dyno, hopefully it's working a bit better now. And because, probably related, I was asked for about pricing things for better performance, a summary!

There are many things that can be paid for when running an app like this (unsurprisingly). Here's the list as I'm currently considering it. I may have forgotten things; feel free to point them out / ask for a breakdown / whatever.

- App dynos. One of these is what serves up standard, someone-opened-a-Constellation-page traffic. Right now we have one running. First is free, additional are $7/month.

- Worker dynos. These do work that is explicitly "does not need to happen within the page load." This is the long term goal for things like subscribing to a post that you are not an author in- when an author posts, a worker dyno would take care of emailing you, because email is slow and it doesn't need to finish emailing you before showing the author the "success you posted the thing" page. I currently have none. Like app dynos, they cost $7/month.

- Database. We're on the standard Heroku PostgreSQL instance now, at Hobby level (up to 10M rows) for $9/month. If I have to upgrade again, this goes up to $50/mo.

- Redis. This is (in my long term plan, at least) used for caching things that are accessed frequently and change rarely. It's also where you store the information about delayed jobs that the workers work on. It's free for basic, upgrades start at $15/mo.

- Image hosting for icons. I'm using Amazon S3 for this. It's currently free up to 5 GB storage (we're at about 0.05 GB, plenty of room for now), 2k add or deletes (we run at about 30% of this right now) and 20k get requests (we exceed this pretty regularly.) For the get requests, we're running at about 420k a month, and they cost 0.004 per 10k requests; this puts me at about $0.17 a month.*

- I probably eventually want a CDN in front of the images so I serve them less. Amazon Cloudfront is the obvious answer since I'm using S3 for the images already. Free tier is 50GB data transfer and 2M requests a month. After that, it's $0.085 per GB and $0.0075 per 10k requests, but these do vary slightly by request origin cause it's geobased and I know we're rather international.*

- Performance monitoring. Right now I'm going by guesswork. NewRelic has a good Rails monitoring framework which comes in free and paid tiers; I'm hoping to keep it to free, as it jumps from free to start at $49/month, and the paid plans cost more the more dynos I'm running.

- A domain! So we're not vastjourneyblahblahblah. Looked into a couple registrars already; www.glowfic.com with privacy protection is about $2/mo.

(*Also important caveat: I think my Amazon free tier runs out after a year, so costs may go up next February/March.)

Soooo tl;dr we're getting by okay for now at a bit over $9/mo. Mid term setup, assuming I install most of the things I want but don't go out of free tiers too fast, will put me at more like $20-30 a month (this adds: domain name, worker dyno, pads the image hosting costs, and adds wiggle room for an extra app dyno, but assumes everything else is free). Long term... presumably I'll have to upgrade the database at minimum, but ugh I'm trying not to think about that xD
User avatar
DanielH
Posts: 3745
Joined: Tue Apr 01, 2014 1:50 pm
Pronouns: he/him/his

Re: The Glowfic Constellation

Post by DanielH »

You can approximately halve the domain name cost; .com domains vary widely and $24/year is on the expensive end of the not ridiculous pricing. If you want to go with a company you've heard of, Google domains is $12/year including WHOIS privacy; if you want something that is cheaper and (for the use cases I was looking at which might or might not match your own) better, NameSilo is $9/year.

I have no thoughts on the rest of the pricing except that another database rows upgrade would be a huge jump.
Marri
Posts: 1026
Joined: Mon Mar 31, 2014 7:47 am

Re: The Glowfic Constellation

Post by Marri »

Ooooh nice. All the domain services I found had the domain at about $12/year; Google doing privacy for free is what's making up the difference. Thanks for the link :)
Marri
Posts: 1026
Joined: Mon Mar 31, 2014 7:47 am

Re: The Glowfic Constellation

Post by Marri »

Updates courtesy of Throne3d:
  • Fixes a bug where toggling the top menu button on a post could change the post editor from RTF to HTML mode, and persists your pick through if you preview
  • Both the unread page and the hidden page now use the post_list partial that all the other pages use, because there's now a way to pass the checkbox through. UNIFIED UI FTW.
  • Fixes a bug where posts written in the RTF editor would have extra line breaks in the email notification. (In some cases; there's a second fix still in review.)
User avatar
Unbitwise
Posts: 535
Joined: Tue Dec 16, 2014 9:39 am
Pronouns: he (or they or whatever)
Contact:

Re: The Glowfic Constellation

Post by Unbitwise »

Feature request: From a post, I click on an icon. I get a page with just that icon. I'd like to be able to, starting from there, see the other icons of that character, like DW does.
Moriwen
Posts: 479
Joined: Mon Oct 19, 2015 5:54 pm
Pronouns: she/her

Re: The Glowfic Constellation

Post by Moriwen »

Unbitwise wrote:Feature request: From a post, I click on an icon. I get a page with just that icon. I'd like to be able to, starting from there, see the other icons of that character, like DW does.
+1

(Maybe links to both (a) the gallery and (b) the character page on that page? I keep clicking on icons meaning to look at the character details and then having to backbutton and remember to click on the character name.)
Post Reply