v1.2.1: Anime Music Releases



Hello everyone!

I have just deployed an update which adds Anison.info scraping, such that the calendar is now able to display music releases related to an anime. These will start showing up on the calendar and anime pages as soon as the database starts to fill up.

This was a feature I had been meaning to implement since I finished implementing MAL sync, but the old website infrastructure had basically blocked any chances of it happening. With the v1.2 huge code cleanup and refactoring, however, this was no longer the case, so I spent the last couple of days slowly implementing the functionality.

Right now, due to the relatively short time I had, the implementation is relatively bare-bones: I scrape the japanese title (sadly Anison.info does not supply a transliterated version), and the release date, catalog number, and some other tidbits of information. To view the tracklist, album picture, etc you will have to access Anison.info directly. Additionally, they work similarly to episodes, in that you can "select"/"deselect" them if you so wish. This could be useful to mark those albums which you have already obtained.

These are fully optional, of course, you can hide them in your site settings page if you don't care about anime music releases. You can also exclude music releases for specific animes by toggling them in the anime's page.

As an example, you can look at the first anime to finish scraping this information here.

State of the website: January 2017

I'm relatively happy of what I managed to do with a couple hours per day over the christmas holidays. The whole website code-base is much cleaner and more maintainable right now. Additionally, I managed to implement one of my most-wanted features for this website. Last but not least, it was a great learning experience (I had barely touched JavaScript/AJAX/jQuery before), so I had a ton of fun.

Don't expect any other new features soon, though. As much fun as it was, my holidays are almost over, so I'll spend the last couple days resting and then will have to go back to work. I don't plan to take any time off soon, and even if I did, I do not see myself spending this much time working on this website as I did these holidays. Maybe this time next year we'll have another large Christmas release? AniDB/Hummingbird synchronization, anyone?

With that said, hope you find this new feature useful, I sure will.

Have a great 2017!