December

The Month of Kenmei! One of the biggest releases to date, with a completely new desktop and mobile UI.

Welcome to the last monthly update of the year. 2020 has been tough but I took an entire month to concentrate on Kenmei, finishing the year with a bang!

While as always, I wish I could have done more this month, the most important and one of the biggest releases since Kenmei inception did happen - the completely rebuilt dashboard UI, for both mobile and desktop. You can read all about it in the latest Feature Deep Dive:

For all the minor details, do check the Changelog as usual:

The Year of 2020

I'd like to take a moment to look back at the previous year, as so much has happened in the land of Kenmei. While it's been a tough year mentally and physically, I tried to make it not affect the development of Kenmei and worked as hard as I could. So here are the highlights:

1. We went from a simple Trackr.moe replacement, with only ability to track MangaDex, to supporting 18 sites (would have been 21 if not for the sites that shut down). Kenmei also got a lot of features that Trackr.moe never had, finally surpassing it.

2. We went from having only 20-50 people join a month, to having hundreds of people join each month. On months without any Discord marketing, we organically get 200-300 new users a month! (almost double during the promotion).

3. Kenmei now tracks 18397 series in total with 196333 entries created by you all. For comparison, over 4 years of Trackr.moe existence, they had 22106 series tracked in total. We are also close to surpassing total userbase that they had. And that's all in a single year.

4. I didn't plan on making Discord server, as I expected only a handful of people to join. But instead, it ended up being quite a bit bigger - with 1500+ members, with enough activity daily to always have someone to chat with

Thank you for sticking with me on this journey of making the best manga tracker. A lot of work has been done, but even more, is yet to be done. Check out the end of this update to find out my plans for 2021, which I plan to make bigger than ever!

Webtoon Support

Instead of going for smaller scanlator sites, I've finally managed to add support for the most requested site - Webtoon. This is also our first official site to be supported, which has been long-overdue.

Webtoon has hundreds of series and being an official source, you won't find them on MangaDex. As a result, this new site gives you access to a lot more series you can follow, all in one place!

I plan to concentrate on more official sites in 2021, hopefully bringing the total count to a dozen or so. Currently, I am looking at adding MangaPlus and Tappytoon next

As a recap, I planned to also finish the extension and new aggregator support this month. But even with 9-10 hours working a day, most of it went into finishing the new UI. It was a very important feature to finish, so it continued to be the focus. I am glad it's done, as without this month, it probably would have taken me months to complete, by just working weekends and evenings

Here the usual breakdown + things I've started working on already :

  1. Revamped manga list UI → 100% Complete

  2. Improving mobile experience → 100% Complete

  3. Official Kenmei Extension → ?% Complete

  4. New aggregator support → 70% Complete

  5. QoL improvements to the new UI post-launch → 20% Complete

I am starting a new job in January, so I expect to have less than usual time to work on Kenmei, so I'll be taking it slowly and focusing on bugs and cleanup, that came as a result of the new UI

As we all hope, 2021 should be the year of recovery and going back to normality. If that indeed happens, I know my productivity should go back to the pre-pandemic levels, back to it's maximum. With that in mind and with everything that has been done this year, I have ambitious goals, outlined below:

1. Leave Alpha and move into Beta - meaning that all of the core systems are going to be in place, with the addition of Manga Discovery right on Kenmei, so that users will be able not just track, but also find manga to read on Kenmei itself.

2. Launch premium features and start putting more funds into infrastructure as well as outsource some things, like design, to elevate the site to another level of polish.

4. Going with point 1 and 2, start to actively promote Kenmei and leave stealth mode that it was operating in till now. This should get us to a point of having a 1000 users join monthly organically!

5. Launch official extension as well as official mobile and desktop apps. This is the most ambitious part of the roadmap, so don't hold your breath for the apps.

6. And much more, which I'll share at the appropriate time!

Thank you, everyone, who started using Kenmei in 2020 and of course in 2019 as well. Kenmei wouldn't have come so far, without your support!

Look forward to all the fantastic things planned in 2021 and I'll see you next month

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