After the twelve-chapter pile-up in your inbox, my brother Daniel asked for this feature.
Now I want a chapters read tracker built in for the user side so I can see what I’ve read and what’s new to read. Especially now that you’re jumping around inserting intermediate chapters…
That’s fair. And it’s a great feature idea. When a new chapter lands between 31 and 32 and gets called 31.1, it doesn’t show up at the end of the list, but in the middle, where it’s not obvious. The dates on the Contents page help a little, but that still means scanning every row to find them.
So now the site keeps track for you.
Finish a chapter and it’s marked read. Scroll to the end of a chapter and it counts as read. Opening one and bailing halfway doesn’t. The next time you open that chapter, the date line at the top tells you when you read it - which answers the “wait, did I read this one?” question another reader asked a while back.
Contents shows where you are. Every chapter gets a small mark: ✓ for ones you’ve read, ● for ones that are new since you caught up, and nothing for the rest. At the top it tells you how many you’ve read, how many are new, and links you to your next unread chapter in reading order. So if you’re deep into the book and I slip a new chapter in earlier, that link sends you back to it instead of forward to the next one on your list.
If you’ve already been reading, catch up in one click. Everyone starts with a blank slate, which would make it look like you’ve read nothing. At the top of Contents there’s a line that says Already read everything published through [date]. It’s preset to the day before my most recent chapters went up, so if you’d kept up until then, it’s one click on Mark read, and whatever I published since lights up as new. If the date’s wrong for you, change it. Any mark can be flipped by clicking it, and Start over clears everything (it asks first).
There’s no account, and nothing leaves your device. Your progress lives in your browser, the same way your art-style and font choices already do. I don’t learn what you’ve read, and there’s no login to forget. The tradeoff is that progress stays on the device you read on - your phone and your laptop keep separate lists. If that turns out to be a real annoyance, tell me and I’ll build a way to move it between devices.