November

Official Kenmei Status page release + improvements to auto-updating, site availability tracking and source deprecation system.

Welcome to the penultimate update of 2020. The year went by pretty quickly, huh? Let's hope in 2021 things will finally go back to normal!

Unfortunately, this has been one of the least productive months, due to a lot of IRL events. I've been moving jobs and home, meaning I've been extremely busy. I did find some time to do less time-consuming, but cool features listed below, but not too much otherwise.

But it's going to be different in December. What I am calling Month of Kenmei, I plan to dedicate at least full 14 days to working on Kenmei. That's about 2 months worth of work with my normal schedule, so I expect to finish a lot of things that have been in progress for awhile.

Read on to find out more...

📋Changelog

🗑️ Source Deprecation System

This is something that I've always wanted to have - knowing when a manga I am reading has been removed/dropped/etc and then easily find a new place to read it at, without losing my reading progress. Work I've started this month will get us there in the near future.

I now track when a series for a particular site (source) stop containing any information, whatever it's because it got dropped, moved or something else. Currently, that lets me look into the reason as to why and address it, if there has been an issue (for example, someone uploading a new series, but then changing the URL on a supported site).

Eventually, though, you'll get a notification right on your Dashboard, so that you can quickly find a different site for this series, for a painless "migration", as one would call it on Tachiyomi. But, instead of a more involved process like on Tachi, it'll be a one-two click process to move your reading progress to another site.

The logic is not bullet-proof yet, so there might be some false positives. As of this writing, there are 80 deprecated sources out of 17661 (some of which are false positives). I will eventually remove those that are correctly deprecated (only after your entries have been moved of course) as well as fix the false positives.

As a reminder, if you see any issues with the series, whatever it has a wrong latest chapter or there are duplicates, don't forget to use Report button to let me know:

Select series you want to report

Select issue you want to report

📡 Supported sites status tracking

To go along with the source deprecation tracking, there is now tracking of whatever one of the supported sites are down or not. While it's also currently being refined and used internally only, in the near future, you'll get notified when a site you track is down (letting you switch to a different one for example), both in the UI itself or as an email notification, if you opt-in.

With both site and source tracking, I want to make it as painless as possible for you to keep your reading progress while switching to sites that has the most recent and high-quality chapter releases. With time, I hope you won't even have to worry about what site you are tracking, as the system will automatically track the most high-quality site with the most recent chapter available, for series you track.

🔋 Official Status Page

A small, but a nice improvement is the new official status page for Kenmei. In case you have trouble connecting to the site, you will now be able to check if it's on your end or the site is actually down. For Kenmei to become #1 manga tracking site, I think it's important to communicate as much as possible, including how often the site goes down, what I am doing to fix an ongoing issue and so on.

On that note, I plan to maintain an industry-standard 99.9% uptime for Kenmei (unlike certain other manga reading sites), and as of the writing, we are at 100% and I expect that to stay maintained for a long time, due to my extreme care when improving the site.

You can check out the page here: https://status.kenmei.co/. When search engines catch up, you should be able to also just google kenmei status (not yet though).

📈 Progress Overview

As mentioned, this month has been slow, but The Month of Kenmei is upon us. I plan to properly finish the 4 points below, specifically focusing on releasing the new UI and the Extension, followed by adding long-awaited new aggregator. If I end up having time for more, I'll do some of the items that were put on-hold.

1. Revamped manga list UI → 90% Complete

2. Improving mobile experience → 60% Complete

3. Official Kenmei Extension → ?% Complete

4. New aggregator support → 70% Complete

Take care and see you next month!