Front End
- Clean design and dark colour theme inspired by clothing brand capeesh and skiing website Newschoolers
- trickipedia index page made using flexboxes, so that the amount of 'trick' buttons in each row will change with screen width
- Trick buttons are added to front page as more tricks are accepted using template for loops
- Media queries to ensure that the site is responsive and looks good at all screen widths and aspect ratios
- All pages extend layout template with navbar and links to prevent code duplication
Back-End
- Written in Django for rapid development, and for Django models. This app uses a model that stores all of the information for each trick, from the video to the description
- Used Django templating for the trick and review pages to avoid unecessary code duplication and bloat, and to allow the site to grow as more tricks are submitted and accepted
- I used SQLite because this app won't need to scale for large amounts of rows. The database will remain relatively small and simple, with only one table
- Wrote Django views that would update the database without relying on the Django admin site. I did this so that I could look at the embedded videos while writing descriptions
- Pages that can change the database are only accessible by the admin user
What I Learned
- How to write RESTful endpoints in Django views to update database
- How to use flexboxes to make flexible layouts
- How to come up with an original and fun concept for a web app
Why I Made This
I made this project because I noticed that there was a niche that a website like this could fill. Other action sports have websites that document all of that sport's tricks, like club540 for tricking, and Book of Tricks for aggressive inline, but skiing does not. Skiing has a truly massive amount of possible tricks, and they're difficult to remember for beginners, so I wanted to create a website that would have video examples and written descriptions of all of them. To make the website more fun for users, I decided that rather than find examples myself, I should allow users to submit their own videos to be used on the site. Each skier could only be featured twice, and once I accepted a video of a trick, submissions for that trick would be closed. This would hopefully create a fun and casually competitive environment for users. Of course, full credit would be given to both the athletes and filmers. I launched this site at the end of September 2023, and it has already gotten a fair few submissions! I also think that this site has the possibility to expand to tutorials as well, and skiing is lacking a comprehensive tutorial series.