July

Like I mentioned yesterday, I’ve quietly spent the last few months dusting the cobwebs off some long-dormant side projects of mine.

Today’s refresh is Supercut.org, a site I first launched in 2011 as part of Seven on Seven with Michael Bell-Smith, and redesigned later that year as a browsable archive of every supercut I could find.

Over the years, videos slowly became unavailable, either deleted, privatized, removed for copyright infringement, or made inaccessible by Vimeo (more on that later). Even as the submission backlog grew, I ended up taking the site offline entirely at the end of 2015 after my server got hacked.

I migrated to a new server, but Supercut.org didn’t make the transition and stayed offline for five years. After auditing my ancient PHP for security holes, I finally brought it back in 2020.

The Changes

I gave the archive a long-overdue design refresh, finally retiring the basic Bootstrap theme and making the site responsive while keeping the overall layout.

All of the old unavailable videos were removed, and I replaced deleted videos with alternatives if I could find them. I cleared the long backlog of submissions, and added quite a few new supercuts to the database, many from Max Tohline’s A Supercut of Supercuts: Aesthetics, Histories, Databases. That was a lot of tedious work, but it brought the live collection to over 580 videos. (You can use the “Add” link to suggest more if you have them!)

If you read Waxy.org entirely via RSS, you may not have noticed that I’ve refreshed the site a bit. Or even if you visit it, you may not have noticed!

I’ve made a bunch of small incremental changes over the last few weeks. Nothing major, mostly fixing a lot of long-standing issues and polishing rough edges that have bothered me for years.

The most notable changes are the redesigned archives and search features, which try to better surface some of my last 24 years of writing here. It includes starred long-form posts, highlighting some of my favorites over the years.

I added better credits to the linkblog, showing a site name, domain, or social media username instead of just the bare “via” link, and added that into the RSS feed for better attribution.