The Purpose
This site provides a complete schedule for all anime/manga related media releases from Japan. Listings include manga, CD, SCD (maxi) and DVDs.
History
Back in 2003, I was actively purchasing manga every month. Since I don't live in Japan, I was restricted to purchasing from online retailers. In order to save money and time, I had to plan my to-buy list in advance. Unfortunately, I ran into several problems:
- Every publisher had different release dates (some even twice a month!)
- My bookmark list was growing in size because I had to keep track of each publisher's website.
- Some sites use form POST method and you can't save bookmarks (easily).
- Website addresses change. Really frustrating.
- Some (smaller) publishers don't have very informative websites
- Navigating through advertisements, and tons of clicks just to get to the information each time can be irritating.
Then one day, I found Mangaoh's list download service. Not only do they list every publisher that prints manga, the information is nicely formatted in CSV. I had just started learing PHP then and decided to use the opportunity to practice. So I wrote a script to parse the information and this site was born :D
This site was originally made just for close friends, but as of 2005, I decided to make it publicly available. All pages are now in UTF-8 encoding and should display fine on all modern browsers. CD/DVD release lists have been added as well.
The Backend
All code on this site is written in PHP by melz. All data is saved in CSV files using UTF-8 encoding. No database system is used. All new listings are obtained daily from Mangaoh using a cron job. Look ma, no hands! :D
Credits
- Mangaoh-CLUB Inc. (まんが王倶楽部), Japan: All release information listed on this site was compiled by the great guys at Mangaoh! Without them, this site wouldn't be possible. ありがとうございます！
- silverorange labs: I use their awesome Updated Simple CSS Tabs code for this site's layout.