April 26

Hi everyone!

Sorry I'm a bit late - I'm particularly unwell atm as my allergy medicine isn't working, I'm in a lot of pain so I'm going at a very slow pace. Not pushing myself or anything, I know my limits, but I still like to try and do stuff when I can. That said, progress is pretty slow at the moment.

I had an eldritch nightmare trying to find a reliable library for uploading large files; it's working now, though. I've also gotten chunked and error-tolerant uploads working for both direct uploading to the ArtCentral server and file transfers to Amazon S3, so the main flow of uploading large files is conceptually done; just some cleanup and so forth to do. I've also sorted out URL signing for private CDN content (so that, if a user pays for e.g. an art bundle, the server can generate a signed URL accessible only by that user for a brief period of time, allowing that content to remain private and unaccessible to anyone else).

I still need to do a fair bit of core infrastructure implementation and cleanup before I want to begin messing about with the site layout and so forth; hopefully in the next few weeks I can start doing that, and once I have that relatively sorted out I can begin to show some site mockups. I just like getting back-end stuff done first.

I talked to Stripe, and they've said that adult content is fine provided that it's not real-life content (which is what I expected). I haven't yet talked to PayPal; I'd rather start with Stripe and go from there, at least for now. I may also need to look into their chargeback protection feature, or otherwise figure out how to deal with the possibility of chargebacks, though those should be pretty rare. I've also been doing some thinking about the business model for a Gumroad competitor; all things considered, I'm confident so far I can offer a significantly cheaper service that won't go into NFTs (or have a deranged social media operator, cough Gumroad cough), especially for small artists, though of course I am going to make absolutely sure I have everything covered before announcing anything.

At some point I should make a list of things that must be completed, sort of like the Trello page but more of a "total progress list" than a todo list.