Yo yo! We're alive.

It's wild to see my last update was 2 years ago.

The TLDR since the last update is I have totally rewritten the code on the site and have a renewed energy for working on the site. For the remainder of the year we're working on some big efforts, both internal and external, to make it the best skate video database on the web.

Frankie also has a lengthier update going up over on Slap.

Done

• Site Rewrite: Completely rewrote the code for the site. For the devs out there I migrated the site to Ruby on Rails. I will have a follow up post soon with the technical details, but the TLDR is that Rails makes sites like ours super easy to work on and simplified a lot of the stack.
• Admin Dashboard Updates: As part of the site rewrite I updated our admin dashboard for our contributors to make adding videos a more pleasant experience
• Search Improvements: We greatly improved our search by using a new search engine rather than our home rolled implementation.
• Random Button: This is a new fun feature that was requested via email, on the videos page there is now a random button and when you click it the next video contains the button again so you can keep it rolling

In Progress

Skater/Filmmaker Consolidation

Currently skaters and filmmakers are separate entities in the database, and we would like to combine them. This was a legacy implementation detail that existed before I started working on the site, and in short, this makes some aspects of development and contribution annoying so we're going to combine them. There's a lot of small details to get this to work right but will be good for the long run.

Next Up

Public Submission Form

When I inherited stewardship of the site's development I chose to disallow public submissions as it just simplified the original rewrite of the site. It's now time to bring public submissions back so people can send us videos easier. This involves quite a bit of extra work such as setting up proper accounts in our system etc, but with the new code base I see this being easier than before.

In the mean time we have a temporary submission form, check it out if you have any videos you want us to add to the site!

Video Submission Form

Misc

Shoutouts

• Doug for spearheading the search improvements
• Vlad for some UI improvements and his excitement about the site
• Frankie for his infinite patience waiting for the rewrite to be done and his massive contributions to the site, he has added over 1300 videos to the site since he joined 2 years ago
• Marcus S for his video contributions as well he's done over 250
• All the people who reach out via email, I'm sorry if it takes me a while to respond but I make sure to get back to each one of them eventually

If anyone reading this is interested in either contributing to the site via adding videos or to the software development hit me up via email!

sean@skatevideo.site

Cheers,
Sean