Andy Baio:

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.

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.

I recall seeing the site’s syndicated feed beginning to error out years ago, wondering what had happened since there was never any mention by Andy. I am happy to see the project return with a fresh (responsive) coat of paint, and a larger archive to boot.