Building a metal search bar
One big, mobile-friendly search bar to look up metal bands, showing you the subgenre and country of origin for each band you look up.
Metal Archives is like a wiki for heavy metal. I use it for exactly one thing: looking up bands on my phone at record shops and shows. The site isn't responsive, so for years I'd been trying to tap a three-pixel search box in the top right corner of the screen.
I finally built the fix I wanted: one giant search bar that queries Metal Archives data directly. Metal Archives were kind enough to let me scrape their site into a database I could query myself, for a much smoother mobile experience. Each result links back to the band's full Metal Archives page.
I use it at record stores and shows now, and looking up bands on the fly is a lot smoother.
Want to go deep on the build? I wrote about the whole process — bot blockers, the webmaster email, scraping 195k bands overnight — over on my blog.