February

Big month for fixing bugs and various improvements to the site, building on top of the Chapter v2 release

This month continues the theme of focusing on improving the site's under the hood systems and I've been very happy with the progress made. As can be seen from the changelog - a lot of bug fixes has been made as well as some nice little improvements across the app

📋Changelog

🔗Sharing Kenmei series

While this month has been mostly about various under the hood improvements - I got inspired and implemented a really fun feature, which gives you a glimpse into the main project for 2022 - Series Discovery

The feature itself is the ability to directly share a link to the series you track, helping anyone really quickly add it to their lists. There has never been an easier way to share what you are reading with other Kenmei members or the rest of the world! See it in action here:

Moreover, it includes a really nifty preview, whatever you are sharing it on Discord, Twitter, Reddit or anywhere else! Here is an example of how it might look if you share the link on Discord. I plan to make the covers look a lot more interesting - check Anilist URL sharing to get an idea of what it might look like

With that in mind, I'd highly encourage you to start using these links to recommend the series to friends or really anybody - in Reddit communities, on Twitter, on your Discord servers and so on. Not only is it easy, but it's one of the best ways to spread the word about Kenmei and help us grow bigger. I will very much appreciate that!

Data Pipeline Improvements & New Sites

As mentioned last month - my main focus is on improving the various systems that govern how I manage supported sites, as well as new ones. I am happy to say I've built some amazing quality of life improvements for myself

First of all, I now have a reliable way to migrate anyone's entries from one source to another, which helped me finally migrate everyone away from deprecated series (Kenmei accumulated hundreds over the last 2 years), and most importantly safely. As a result, I completely removed the oldest sites, that were sticking around due to the inability to migrate existing users. You might recognise some of these:

  • Jaimini's Box

  • KKJ Scans

  • Edelgarde Scans

  • Helvetica Scans

  • Hatigarm Scans

  • Method Scans

That is a huge milestone for Kenmei - I can now safely remove sites that are no longer around, without anyone losing their entries. I've mentioned before, that I wanted to gain this ability, before introducing new sites... And now that we have it, I am happy to announce 4 new sites has been added!

Moreover, I am also able to add sites without the existing RSS Feed or API now, making it possible to add pretty much any site. I plan to add a couple more scans sites next month and then move onto the official sites, which has been neglected for way too long.

🚀 Bug Fixes

You can see the full list in the Changelog, but this month has been massive for fixing bugs. I've managed to address a whopping 10 bugs this month and I will continue focusing on the most important ones next month. Here are some notable examples:

  • Fix MangaDex not showing all chapters due to incorrect filtering

  • Fix actions dropdown being cut-off on short lists on mobile

  • Fix Read Manhua showing chapters as being released in the future incorrectly

  • Make chapter badges correctly truncate, when they are very long

  • And more

📈 Progress Overview

This month has been smooth sailing - I am really happy with the cleanup I've been doing and Kenmei Share functionality is super fun and I've been happy to see everyone using it on our Discord server.

For the upcoming month, I am going to continue Data Pipeline Improvements - with a special focus on improving how series gets added and approved on Kenmei. Since Chapters v2, it became a big time sink of mine, to approve the series (which was necessary to stop adding duplicates to Kenmei) being suggested. So I am starting to work on Reporting v2 - a unified UI for approving suggestions as well as resolving duplicates -> After it's done, I'll also be able to start preparing to onboard the first data moderators to Kenmei, to help me with this ever-growing task.

Of course -> there are other cool features I might decide to work on - just like Kenmei Share this month. On that note - have a great month and hope to see you soon!

Here's the breakdown of the priorities for the next month:

  • Data Pipeline Improvements

  • Reporting v2

  • Bug fixing & across the board improvements

  • Kenmei Extension

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