January
A short update, due to most of the month being carry over from December, but there are still a bunch of new improvements
This update is going to be short and sweet - most of the month has been taken by Chapters v2, which has been explained in the December 2021 update. So this update is just half a month worth of work, but we had to get back on schedule with monthly updates, hence I decided to still write one up.
While not much has been ahead, there are 2 major improvements that will be appreciated! Read ahead to find out what those are...
📋Changelog🔍Alternative titles search
Now that there is no way to add series by URL, it was important to bring my attention to improving titles search. One of the biggest issues has always been trying to find a series by a title, that Kenmei didn't have - as main titles would usually be in Romaji (Romanised Japanese), resulting in poor search results.
So I got cracking and I am happy to say it's now possible to search by alternative titles! 22445 out of 26377 series now have alternative titles, and the number of total titles in Kenmei went from 79131 to 156707, so you are a lot more likely to find what you are looking for. And the data will, of course, continue to get better over time.
And as a bonus, your own list search has also been improved - it searches by alternative titles as well now + provides more accurate results. Meaning you are less likely to waste time trying to find that one title, you've added ages ago, but don't remember the specific title you used
⚡Search Performance
After alternative titles search has been added, I've realised that the search speed became even slower. It was over a second on average (and often a lot longer than that), which was unacceptable, so I decided it was finally time to put some time into improving it. And boy, did it improve.
While it took me a bit of time to find the right combination of changes, the increase in speed, depending on the query, became 10-20x faster (!!!). Basically, if you try to search for a series to add, you are more than likely to get the result instantly.
Filtering your own list is also faster, but not as fast as Adding new Series, due to other queries that happen, that are yet to be optimised to their fullest. Nevertheless, I don't expect having to spend any time improving the search for a long, long time.
The best way to see it in action is to just try it out - If you've used the search before, you should be able to notice the difference - what would usually take a couple of seconds, now happens instantly ⚡⚡⚡
🚀 Chapters v2 cleanup
The rest of my time went into addressing any of the bugs or issues that came up, with the wider release of Chapters v2. Thankfully, nothing major came up, but there were still a few things I had to address and I still need to do some adjustments going forward, but overall the release has been a huge success in terms of its stability
You can see the full list in the Changelog, but some of the examples are:
Fix inability to delete own account post-Chapters v2 release
Fix status select going off-screen when editing an entry
Improve series suggestions logic to approve more series automatically
and more
📈 Progress Overview
Thankfully, no major issues came up as a result of Chapters v2 release, so the second half of January wasn't stressful and I managed to take my time picking low hanging fruit and addressing those minor issues.
For the upcoming month, I am going to continue taking it slowly and focus on fixing bugs and taking care of data improvements that Chapters v2 finally unlocked. That means consolidating duplicates, removing support for sites that have been disabled for some time, and lots more -> All of that is important groundwork for Discovery functionality I plan to tackle this year
Data Pipeline Improvements
Bug fixing & across the board improvements
Kenmei Extension
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