TheDataDB February 2021 Newsletter

Intro

To all of our new supporters, welcome to our bi-monthly newsletter. You may or may not realise that TheDataDB actually comprises of a suite of metadata sites covering music, sports, cocktails and recipes, so we provide a snapshot of the recent developments across each in these newsletters, and of course, you are welcome to utilise any or all of our APIs you would like to!

There are tens of thousands of edits a month across all the sites which we could never hope to cover here, but we are always working on new features and content in the background ourselves as well.

To our longer standing supporters who know the drill by now, a belated happy New Year! 

Before we dive in, we wanted to draw your attention to two items in particular...

TheCocktailDB named as 4th most popular API on RapidAPI!

Our APIs are often mentioned by RapidAPI, but we were super pleased to see that TheCocktailDB made it into their top 50 most popular APIs; in fact, it was named 4th!! It was behind the likes of the Skyscanner Flight Search API, but in front of Yahoo Finance! It’s even being picked up by other blogs, including Nordic APIs who run API conferences across Scandinavia, as part of their piece on the top 7 popular APIs of 2021. Time for a cocktail to celebrate!

Like the sound of 16% discount? Switch to an annual subscription to save!

As mentioned in our December newsletter, we recently introduced an option to pay for an annual rather than monthly subscription and take advantage of a discount. There are savings to be had on all supporter tiers so no one misses out. These have proven to be popular already, but we want to ensure it’s not just our new supporters who get to take advantage of this.

TheCocktailDB

www.thecocktaildb.com

While we focussed on adding Christmas themed cocktails in the lead up to December, since then we have continued in a similar vein by adding winter themed ones. Examples include ”SnowDay”, “Hot Toddy” and “Winter Rita”...whoever Rita is! Next we will be adding the ability to pull the type of cocktail via the API based on certain tags ie winter.

As some of you are aware, we have been working on creating translations of the cocktail instructions, most recently a complete Italian description translation, but we also have German too. This is very much a work in progress and relies heavily on the help of you, the users and community to support good quality translations. We’d love to add other languages, such as French, Spanish and Chinese. If any of our supporters feel they could help with this, please get in touch with us here: thedatadb@gmail.com

We've also done some more work on attributing our images and migrating many of them to the creative commons license. This work continues next month when we hope to upload a big batch of new photos.

TheMealDB

www.themealdb.com

Portugal is the country of the month! We’ve been busy adding Portuguese recipes and reminiscing about travels there! 'Pasteis de nata' is definitely our favourite but we haven’t attempted baking them ourselves yet!

Anyone visiting TheMealDB website may not realise that developers are able to pull recipes based on various categories such as vegan or chicken etc via the API, so we have decided that for consistency we should add this to the front end as well.

TheAudioDB

www.theaudiodb.com

We’ve recently had an influx of new Patreon supporters for the TheAudioDB website, so another welcome to all the new users! This site has been running the longest and you will no doubt notice the breadth of data available.

We’ve made a few improvements recently including:

- The addition of another space for fanart, so now 4 images can be uploaded against each artist, providing even more choice of imagery to utilise.

- Many New 3D covers for albums are being added. A big thanks to Zorg2000 who has consistently uploaded thousands of new 3D album covers.

- The top menu wasn’t appearing as it should have been on mobiles, so this has been rectified.

TheSportsDB

www.thesportsdb.com

We’ve implemented a number of improvements and new features the last couple of months, the highlights of which include:

- Team formations for soccer: The team formation for each soccer match will be available with artwork and links to each player.

- Artwork mapping feature : Artwork from previous seasons and will be automatically applied to new upcoming events saving the person time as default, but new artwork can be added manually, but this can be overridden manually if desired

- Historical team jerseys or equipment are now available via the API with up to 5 different kits per season.

- Event times have been made more consistent

- Square artwork posters: We previously had the ability to add and therefore show artwork in landscape and portrait format, however more and more square posters/images are now being used, especially on social media, so we’ve implemented this additional format for greater choice.

- Next 5 events now available only to Patreon supporters: We are constantly monitoring the API’s performance looking at how it’s being used and to see how we could potentially improve on that. We noticed that the free feature to pull the next 5 events , was being exploited and causing a significant effect on the responsiveness and load. By changing this to a Patreon supporter feature only, we have already seen greatly improved performance.

Conclusion

That's it for this month, thanks for reading and please do let us know what you think in the comments or on the dedicated sites forums. Each month we receive a tonne of email and many of the discussions help the direction of the sites in the future.