April 11

Hi everyone! Hope you're all doing well ^^

I've been implementing some of the main backend stuff for ArtCentral - logins, various pages, and experimenting with some CSS layouts for a basic interface. The main things on the agenda at the moment are:

• Designing the layout of user portfolio pages, search results pages
  
  
• Experimenting with CDN integration for faster load times, but more importantly, for future use if I turned the site into a Gumroad alternative. It shouldn't need more than one server to serve requests in theory unless the site became pretty large, but for large file downloads a CDN distribution would undoubtedly be needed so I'm going into that at the moment. I have some experience using AWS services before, so using Amazon S3 + Cloudfront should be plausible to implement, but it'll take some time to figure out all the details involved in integrating them and so forth.
  
  
• A whole bunch of website implementation details: image resizing and compression which should be relatively easy, nice HTML formatted emails, database schema and so forth. Not expecting any of this to be too difficult, there's just a ton of it to do, so it'll take a long time.

For now, CDN stuff is not a major concern; first I'll implement the site as a commission portfolio place, then think about that part afterwards, but it's always worth looking into these things early on.