NeedCoolerShoes

A Restoration of Miners Need Cool Shoes

In January of 2023, the popular skin editing site needcoolshoes.com, or Miners Need Cool Shoes, went dark, never to return.

In the following months, countless people across sites like Reddit would lament the loss of the site, as it's editor was one of the nicest to use, and had the best layer support of them all.

My friend, Wulfian, was a prolific user of the site, and in April of the same year wished to make a set of skins for our friend group, but could not as the site was down.

a Miner Needs Cool Shoes...

Seeing the demand for the editor, I took the wayback machine archive of the old site, and hacked together a working version, putting it up at coolshoes.moxvallix.com.

It was limited; the gallery didn't work, and was a buggy mess. But it did the job.

I spread around the word of my restoration, and people were quite excited.

It was not too long before people started asking "but where is the gallery?". The version I had made was just a static site. Luckily, most of the editor functioned as client side javascript. But the gallery was a vital part of the editor, as the editor was built around using other skins as layers.

...no, they Need Cooler Shoes

I am a Rails developer, so making a basic CRUD app is second nature to me. Within a couple days of coolshoes.moxvallix.com being online, I had developed its sucessor: needcoolershoes.com.

I took the hacked editor I had made, and hacked it some more. I managed to replace the submission form with a Rails form, and soon skin submissions were working. I created a basic gallery, allowing users to browse skins, and use them in the editor.

I started linking to that site instead of coolshoes.moxvallix.com, and the site started to gain some traction.

Slowly, users were signing up, and sharing their skins. Some users even had archived skins from the old site themselves, and decided to re-upload them as part of the restoration. Within 11 days, we had hit 100 skins, and a month after that we hit 500.

The site has been growing since, and, as of the time of writing (31/05/2024), we have over 6800 skins!

Our Discord community is almost at 200 members, and it has been lovely to receive all the grateful messages users have sent thanking the team for our efforts restoring the site.

The Future

A new editor for the site is in the works, indev.needcoolershoes.com, which is slowly being developed, whenever I have the time. One day it will replace the old editor, and bring with it a bunch of much needed new features.

The site itself has been constantly improved, sporting now a feature rich gallery, new features hacked in to the editor, and even an attributions system for keeping track of what parts are used in what skin.

As long as there is a community of passionate skin creators using the site, I intend to keep working to improve it.