Site Development Updates
1/15/2023

YO YO!

Sorry it's been a long time since our last update, but we're still here and kicking!

Lately much of my (limited) free time has been taken up by adding videos to Skateboardle. Apologies if that has taken away from SVS's development a little bit, but I have managed to get people addicted to the game and I'm afraid of what will happen if I don't keep it up!

In an effort to keep y'all more informed, I will try to get back in the habit of posting an update once a month and follow a more standard format of:

  • What we've completed
  • What's in progress
  • What's up next
  • Misc Info

Done

UI Refresh

You might have noticed the site recently got a bit of a facelift. While it is nothing flashy, it was a major overhaul of our CSS styling system which will enable us to more easily update the style of the site. Also we now have dark mode.

Additionally we have a new skater/designer helping us build out the future look and feel of the site. Over the next few months the site's look and feel will be changing even further for the better.


In Progress

Public Submission Form

We are working on a way to allow public video submissions so they can be sent directly to us for review and added easily to the site. We get a handful of people asking us via email to add videos on their behalf and this form will enable y'all to


Next Up

Search Improvements

One of the major parts of the site we would like to improve is the search quality and the search UI/UX. Search is one of the most important, if not the most important parts of the site and there is a number of ways we can improve the results page as well as the quality of searching.


Misc

Major shoutouts to

  • bagd - our new deisgner for whipping up a set of new site designs
  • frankiesomethin - one of our core contributors who adds a ton of videos to the site and helps out a ton with skateboardle
  • Walker Ryan for collaborating with us on Skateboardle last month

Cheers

8/26/2022

Hey peeps!

Lot's of things happening in the last few weeks.

Domain Transition

Firstly, the domain transition is complete. Now everything redirects and resolves to https://skatevideosite.com rather than https://skatevideo.site.

There might be some lingering "dead" links out there since the URLs are slightly different, but we felt it was important to get the site back up on the original domain.

Skateboardle

Unfortunately I don't have any recent updates to SkateVideoSite, but that is because I have been cranking out our new site/game Skateboardle!

It's a skate video trivia game based on the Wordle type games. Let me know what y'all think!

Thanks for all of the support.

Cheers

8/8/2022

Heyo!

Sorry if you experienced any issues with the site today. We finally combined the skatevideo.site and skatevideosite.com domains.

Moving forward we will be primarily serving off of skatevideosite.com but we still have a little bit of work to iron out.

There might be some more intermittent blips, thanks for being patient.

I'll have another update once we're done.

Cheers

7/24/2022

YO YO!

Sorry for the lack of updates in the past few months, life has been generally busy, but rest assured we are still working behind the scenes on the site.

One highlight is that a few of us made it out to Copenhagen for the CPH Open back in June. It was rad, we saw some awesome skateboarding, skated some amazing spots, and had a great time. Highly recommend making it out to Copenhagen if you can, it's a great place.

Now for some site updates.

Done

Tagging System

We added the ability for our site contributors to add tags to a video. This is basically another layer of metadata for a video and which you can also filter by. Tags can be anything so be on the lookout for some tagged videos!

Extra Video Links

We added a new field to the video details page which contains additional links. We typically use this to link to our YouTube song playlist of the video or to the company's webpage etc.

Various of small bugs and CSS fixes

Honestly they're all really boring, but they were important to fix! :)

In Progress

Public Video-Submission Form

We're working on a form to allow people to submit videos more easily to the site. Rather than emailing us you will have a nice form to fill out which we can then review and add to the site. This one should be out soon!

Combining the Website Domains

Currently skatevideosite.com is the old version of the site. Since that domain has much more history and web presence we will be changing this site's domain from skatevideo.site to skatevideosite.com. This will likely happen in the next few weeks.

Misc

Looking for Contributors!

If you would like to contribute to adding/editing skate video data on this site please reach out! We would love to have more contributors help with the never ending flow of skateboarding data. Email us at support@skatevideo.site if interested.

Until next time, cheers

4/18/2022

Hey folks, just a couple updates coming at ya since last time.

Done

Video Page Redesign

This one has been a long time coming. We will be slowly improving other pages on the site as well. Most of our developers are "back-end" focused and we could definitely use some help on the design side. So if any of you have front end experience and would like to help please reach out.

Details field for the Companies page

We added a Details field on the Companies page where we can add miscellaneous information about a company. We currently don't have much data there at the moment but it's always good to have the option to add more data.

Ability to Delete a video

Up until now our admin tools couldn't delete videos so we had to manually. Now they can.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed an issue where admins couldn't properly delete all skaters from a video
  • Fixed an issue where a some fields had too low of text length limits which would cause an error when exceeded

In Progress

  • Multiple linked images on a video page
  • Some sort of song "playlist" integration with YouTube
    • We started a YouTube channel to compile song playlists for videos, check it out: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu_67YFqwR49e18MbGBE_Vg/playlists

Cheers

3/13/2022

Yo! Sorry it's been a little while since the last update, I recently had my first child so my time has been a bit limited to say the least :)

Major Updates

Today we have a fun update, we finally have filters and sorting! Now you can go to the all videos page and filter videos by

  • skaters
  • companies
  • filmmakers
  • year
  • category
  • sort by title/date/year

This effort was led by one of our homie devs in Indonesia, big props to him for spearheading this feature.

Minor Updates

Also we updated the UI a little bit.

  • Images on the video cards are now clickable
  • Video cards display more information such as filmmaker, skaters, and category.

Additionally we improved the skaters search function. It will now properly return results with non-english characters, as well as handle some minor misspellings.

We also added pagination on the home page. The home page is sorted by most recently uploaded to the site and you can now continue onto the next page at the bottom.

Lastly, as always there's work going behind the scenes to clean up data and make it easier for our site contributors to add/edit content on the site.

Hope y'all enjoy, and please reach out if you encounter any bugs or just want to say what's up.

Cheers

1/16/2022

Yo! Happy New Year!

2022 is going good for the site so far. We're now getting help from a 4th dev which has been awesome.

Since the last update we've had ~17 pull requests merged to the site's code base. You can think of a pull request as some sort of change or improvement to the code. Most of these recent changes aren't user facing as we have been doing lots of work on "back-end" side of things, but we do have some things you will notice.

Done

  • Fixed a bug where sometimes the search input would receive undefined
  • Improved loading performance for video list pages, specifically on a skater's page with lots of videos
  • Soundtrack search results are now grouped by video
    • For example if you search mark suciu you will see all of his songs grouped together in the Habitat - Search The Horizon result
  • You can now search for Filmmakers

In Progress

  • Filtering videos by various parameters e.g. year, skaters, company etc.
  • Ongoing improvements to our internal admin tools
  • Ongoing ui/ux improvements, you should be seeing some minor facelifts in the coming weeks

There's more "boring" stuff going on as well, but these are the highlights.

As always, reach out if you have any feedback or just want to say what's up.

Cheers!

12/19/21

Since our last update we had a new developer join to help us out. He's also a fellow skater and we're happy to have him around!

Done

  • Greatly improved video search.
    • Video search would not return results for seemingly good search queries. For example you would receive results for "Yeah Right" but not "Girl Yeah Right". This was simply due to how we set up our search logic and is now fixed.
  • Added a data correction submission form.
    • On the bottom right of every video page there is now form for you to submit any sort of corrections for video data. It can be used to point out a song isn't correct or we're missing a skater etc. We still have to manually fix the problems, so please be patient if you submit one and don't see the data update immedidately.
  • Improving internal admin tooling for adding videos.
  • Imported latest videos from the OG skatevideosite.com
  • Fixed a few small bugs.
    • There was an issue where the search parameters were somehow receiving "undefined"

In Progress

  • Continuing to improve our admin tooling.
  • Improve skater name search.

Cheers!

11/25/21

Happy Thanksgiving for our friends in the U.S.!

Since the last update we have completed a ton of tasks behind the scenes in preparation for a site transition. There's nothing flashy to show, but are things to make the development easier for us.

Done

  • Imported all of the remaining 2020-2021 data into the site!
    • As of now we have 99% of the data from the original site. We are still adding data to the old site until we fully transition to this one.
  • Added tools for adding/updating skaters for the admins.
  • Created a system to keep track of site data changes we make so we can ensure data isn't accidentally lost or overwritten.
  • Fixed a few small bugs.

In Progress

  • Have our maintainers test out adding/edting videos into this site.

Cheers!

10/05/21

Small update for this week.

Done

  • Fixed a few bugs
  • Added ability to upload cover image in the admin tools

In Progress

  • 2020-2021 data import preparation - this is top priority
  • Creating internal tools to add skaters
9/15/21

Yo! I wanted to give a quick update on the status of the site.

First, I want to thank the creators and contributors of the original skatevideosite.com site. They have graciously let me use the original data to redevelop this new site as a passion project. Like many others, I have used the original site for a long time and am truly appreciative for all the work they have done.

I'm working on this as much as I can in my free time, so thanks again to all of you visitors for being patient. I am aware there are still some rough edges in the UI and functionality, but the site is indeed being worked on and things will gradually improve over time. Our dev team is composed of coders who also skate, so rest assured the site is in good hands!

With that said I want to share our next priorities and what to expect in the near future.

Current priorities:

  • Finish Admin Tooling
    • We are creating custom tools to manage the data which will allow us to start adding new videos again. This is close to being done.
  • Import 2020-2021 Data
    • We only have the data up until January 2020. In the mean time, videos have continued to be added to the original site. We will need to import the missing data into our new system. This will be a bit tricky since the data models of this site and the original site have diverged.
  • Improve Search
    • Search is one of the core parts to this site. The search function is decent at the moment, however we are aware of a few limitations and will be making it better. We also have a beta search UI we have been toying with, you might see it soon.
  • UI/UX improvements
    • This will be focused on more once the above tasks are done.

I will be periodically adding updates to this page when I have something notable to share. Be on the lookout!

Cheers, SkateVideoSite team

PS: If you have any questions/concerns/comments feel free to email support@skatevideo.site