April 2020 Newsletter

Since our last newsletter, the world has shifted for everyone. We personally received a flurry of messages from organisations wanting to talk about the pandemic and the impact it was having on them, so were reluctant to share our newsletter last month, instead choosing to just “keep calm and carry on” – and hopefully be one less organisation adding to the overload everyone is experiencing!

Having said that, as mentioned in our last newsletter, we have reviewed the frequency of our updates to Patreon supporters and decided that now makes sense to change to every other month instead. Hopefully not too frequently to annoy, but enough of a gap to leave you wanting more ;)

The lockdown and impacts of the pandemic thankfully don’t have any affect to our sites or our ability to run or develop them, so it is very much business as usual for us! Other than TheSportsDB due to the lack of sports fixtures of course! 

Updates on the latest developments for each site are below as always. But in addition, we wanted to share something exciting with you – we have started work on a new site within TheDataDB family – for TV shows! We’ll share more info on this shortly and look forward to your input and ideas!

We’ve also extended the remaining domain names for another 10 years so you can rest assured the sites and APIs will be around for use for many, many years to come!

TheCocktailDB
https://www.thecocktaildb.com

We’ve added some popular summer cocktails such as white sangria and Aperol spritz which we were amazed we didn’t already have on there! If you feel that there are any others we should include please do let us know.

A reminder that we have over 50 cocktail images with Creative Commons Licensing which can be accessed via the database field “strCreativeCommonsConfirmed”, available on the API. More will follow very soon.

TheSportsDB
https://www.thesportsdb.com/

Possibly one of the worst side effects of this global pandemic and lockdown, other than the obvious of course, has been all sports fixtures being cancelled! 

So with no new listings, we, and our community, have been using the time to fill out league, team and player details, including;

- Player former youth teams support

- Manager former teams support

- Archive of historic jerseys

- All Premier league teams with completed player renders

- Indycar, Nascar, Soccer, NFL, NBA and British Touring car teams have all been updated with the latest player transfers and artwork.

We don’t know how long sports fixtures may continue to be impacted for, so if you have any other suggestions on how to extend the data or add new features, please let us know on the forums or via email.

TheAudioDB
https://www.theaudiodb.com/

During this difficult time, we’ve seen a growing number of musicians and artists perform live sets on social media bringing entertainment right into people’s homes. It’s been great to see this from such a variety of artist to keep our spirits up!

In the meantime, we’ve made some updates including ensuring the latest albums of various artists are added along with the corresponding artwork, and introduced an updated chart feature which tracks trends in streaming and buying music. 

We also worked on updating the top 100 Youtube Music Videos in our special list. Can you believe Despacito is STILL the number one with 7 billion plays on YouTube! I mean is it that good? Saying that, the second closest is Baby Shark so maybe we don't mind so much after all...

TheMealDB
https://www.themealdb.com/

You may have read that a number of famous chain restaurants have been sharing the recipes for some of their most popular meals – so if you’re missing your favourite restaurant, take a look to see if its on here for you to try at home! To find it just search for your favourite restaurant as the search item. 

If you come across a recipe that’s been released but we haven’t yet added, let us know! I know personally, I can't wait to try making my very own Krispy Kreme donut! or McDonalds Big Mac.
 

We’ve also added in some new Greek recipes and added a variety of new ingredients, so if you are being adventurous in the kitchen during lockdown, please do let us know and we can add them to the database!

A big thank you as always to our loyal supporters and contributors especially during difficult times like now. Stay safe, look out for one another and keep on developing!