skateboard.fyi
| url: | https://skateboard.fyi |
I’m the solo founder of skateboard.fyi, an independent archive and research platform for skateboard print culture. I started the project in 2025 and began physical archival work in December that year.
Why I started
Watching Atiba Jefferson’s episode of Epicly Later’d, I wanted to follow the evolution of his published photography. Individual websites and social accounts showed parts of the story, but I couldn’t find a timeline across the magazines.
That question grew into a broader one: how can we explore the people, images, places, and connections that shaped skateboarding?
What I’m building
The published archive includes 281 issues and more than 15,000 pages as of October 2026. Readers can browse magazines, search their text, and explore records of people, brands, tricks, and spots.
I develop the platform and its ingestion tools: local OCR, image processing, storage, database indexing, and publication. The current site uses Astro, Preact, TypeScript, Turso/libSQL, Drizzle, and Cloudflare Workers and R2. Local OCR tooling uses Swift and Apple Vision.
From paper to a research tool
The archival work starts with physical magazines and a DIY book scanner. From there, scans need to be cropped, corrected, processed, and indexed. I’m developing the tools and workflow alongside the collection, including annotations and AI-assisted tagging with editorial review.
The platform is still developing. My focus is on making the collection easier to search, improving its annotations, and continuing the digitization work.