anime-helper.md

Seasonal Anime Helper for AniList

Not something I would normally share. But it felt like something worth a quick blog post.

Seasonal Anime Helper for AniList is a small webapp I built last Tuesday that pulls data from AniList. You can quickly browse seasonal anime, generate useful links, and grab easy copy-paste details for calendars and RSS applications.

This project took about 4 hours to finish. From the start, I planned to keep this a one-day project. The original plan was a Chrome extension. Still, building a website sounded more useful and a little more interesting. And something as simple as this had several interesting problems to solve.

Why I made this

When I started watching anime again last year, I came to the conclusion the best way to keep up with everything was to stop doing it manually. RSS pulls the episodes, and I track everything on a pretty clever calendar setup. But the biggest bottleneck was the setup itself.

Start of the season hits. Schedules go up. Dig through schedules, make assumptions about series lengths, copy and paste details, and figure out which sub group is covering which show. And it’s usually a mess. Way too many tabs, too much manual searching, and no clean way to pull it all together.

AniChart and a few other sites help, but I never found anything that visualized seasonal anime in a way I really cared for. I like having a page I can just leave open, click to copy, and move on. The real “feature” is the link builder for Nyaa and RSS Feeds. But it’s also been cool seeing friends discover shows they would have otherwise missed thanks to how the site displays information.

coolstuff

All of the actual hard work is taken care of by AniList. It’s wild how much high-quality data they make freely available for anyone to build on. But outside the main features, there’s a bunch of smaller parts that are fun to examine.

• Smart Page State Tracking. Skips repeat fetches and adds some extra polish with content hiding and fade effects on navigation. It only really “breaks” when you get rate limited.

• Ongoing from Last Season. If a show from last season is still marked as “Releasing”, it’ll be added to the results. Once finished, it is removed from the list.

• Filtered Results. Anything marked as adult media and low-duration content is skipped automatically.

• RSS Feed Query Cleanup. Small regex to clean up titles of colons when generating the Nyaa link, which typically break search queries. It also includes “1080p” and excludes “Batch” to refine search results.

• RSS Feed Icon. ✅ means it’s filtered for “SubsPlease.” ⚠️ shows if the title has a season number (could cause match issues) or no sub group is set, so you should check the results yourself.

• Click-to-Copy. Click any field in the sidebar to copy it. When you do, a toast pops up with a to confirm it. When text doesn’t fit in the sidebar, it fades out with a gradient to show it’s been shortened.

• Visual Polish. Cards animate in with a staggered delay for a smoother grid feel. Hovering posters triggers a glossy glassmorphism effect. Clicking the home icon triggers a quick sink-then-pop animation. Loading and notifications use transitions to keep the visuals consistent. I didn’t do much, but it still looks better than it probably should.

• Mobile lol. It kind of works on mobile. Not ideal, but it doesn’t break. Some features are hidden on mobile. Just didn’t feel like building a whole second layout.
  
  

That’s it

I’m good with where this landed. MIT License, but I could care less about what anyone does with this. This site is really only useful a total of four times a year. But the main goal was to test a concept and build it in a short period of time. And that’s honestly a useful skill to have.