December 2020 Newsletter

Welcome to our bi-monthly newsletter – New Year special!

We particularly want to welcome any new users to the community. We have recently hit 500 total Patreon supporters across all of our sites, and can reach around 10 million visits a day across them all! But without you, our Patreon supporters, we wouldn’t be able to keep doing what we are, and keep developing new features and services (including launching new sites - more on this below!!), so a big thank you too.

As 2020 draws to a close, there is another thank you owed is to the many coders and users, including those who aren’t Patreon supporters, but still enjoy devoting hours and in some instances, daily, adding data to the sites, purely for the fun of it!

New Patreon Payment Options – Post Black Friday/New Year Offer!

How many of you got lured into the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale bonanza?! Well, even though we are well past that now, we have recently released a new yearly payment option for Patreon supporters.

Sign up to a yearly subscription to receive a 16% discount! This is across all the different supporting tiers of subscriptions.

And now for something completely different. Sort of!

Introducing... TheShowDB!

Our new site TheShowDB was recently soft launched BUT is still in heavy development mode. We aim to provide an alternative to the existing metadata sites for TV Shows, with an emphasis on a simple API, good quality artwork and reliable data.

Feel free to check out the site for yourself. While it is still in development with new features and data being rolled out constantly, as with all our sites, if you have an interest and suggestions or requests for specific types of data not already there, let us know!

There will be a more detailed preview and update in the next newsletter including how to become a supporter.

https://www.theshowdb.com/

TheCocktailDB
https://www.thecocktaildb.com

As always, we’ve added some additional ingredients items and some new cocktails since our last update, including some festive ones! Will you be partaking in some mulled wine, or is it time for a Snowball? 😊

We’ve also continued to add some new images with Creative Commons licensing, of which there are around 90 currently, and are growing every week. This is up from 30 last month.

In a similar vein, we have added a new data field for image attribution, so the original source or owner is noted such as Instagram, or the photographer themselves.

TheMealDB
https://www.themealdb.com

Are you a turkey traditionalist? Or a fancier three bird roast kind of person? Or do you, like someone I heard on a Podcast recently, go for something totally obscure such as a KFC?! Well, we have added some new Christmas meal recipes and ingredients to boot, for whatever makes Christmas sparkle for you 😉

We’ve also added a new set of traditional Irish meals, many of which sound like great hearty winter warmers for those of you in colder climates this time of year!

In other news, we fixed some issues with browsing on mobile but do let us know if you spot anything we missed.

TheSportsDB
https://www.thesportsdb.com

There has been a lot of preparation for the new 2021 leagues going on behind the scenes, most notably for the NBA and baseball thus far. As well as trying to make sure that all of the 2020 is complete. This includes golfing events such as the men’s and women’s PGA, the European Tour, and even the lesser-known Senior Tour now has artwork and data added.

Event line-ups, timelines and stats have also now been added to our V1 API.

We have also recently launched player statistic previews, comparing the last years stats with this year’s, on the website, which we aim to have available to the API soon.

There were a lot of requests for the player images to be provided as a transparent file type, which are now available, and already we can see how they can make event line-ups look awesome!

We also added a new newsfeed showing in detail the latest additions to the site including artwork previews.

TheAudioDB
https://www.theaudiodb.com

As expected the latest singles added recently were classic Christmas pop songs, such as Mariah Carey’s “All I want for Christmas is you” and “Jungle Bell Rock” by Bobby Helms (sorry bet these are in your head AGAIN now if they hadn’t been already 😀!) Love them or hate them, Christmas isn’t Christmas without them hey!

Some of you may know Kodi, the open-source home entertainment hub (if you don’t you can check out their website here https://kodi.tv). Data from all of our sites are used within various Kodi apps and as the default metadata used, utilising our APIs, to show things such as music album artwork, a sports match result, and cocktail ingredients within the hub.

TheAudioDB was the first to be used in this way and the newest version of Kodi will also include scrapers that support all of our artwork types, including 3D covers, which is pretty cool in our world!

In the lead up to this, there have been a lot of users updating and adding the music metadata to get ready for this next Kodi release, but of course that also benefits all other users of the site and data. Thank you to everyone involved, from the users, the Kodi developers and the Kodi community!

Finally, we want to wish you a very merry Christmas however it looks like for you this year and hopefully a significantly more normal and enjoyable 2021 for everyone. Thank you again for all of your support, supporters old and new.