Bladefinity
A catalogue of inline skating equipment that brings together products, specifications and retailer listings, alongside skating spots and city maps.
Bladefinity is a free resource for finding and comparing inline skating equipment. The catalogue brings together products from different retailers, alongside articles, skating locations and curated city maps.
The catalogue
One of the more involved parts of the project is making sense of how different shops describe the same equipment. Product names often include sizes, colours or other specifications, and the distinction between a product and one of its variants isn’t consistent across retailers.
I designed the catalogue around a shared product record, with variants and retailer listings kept separately. This gives each piece of equipment a single place for its specifications and editorial content, while prices and availability can come from several shops.
Managing the site
The public site and its editorial area are built with Laravel and Livewire. The Studio covers products, taxonomy, articles, skating locations and maps, using the same models and validation as the public catalogue. Keeping both in one application means I can make changes to the product model without maintaining a separate frontend for the editorial tools.
Collecting product data
The scraper originally lived inside the Laravel application. As the number and variety of retailers increased, I moved it into a dedicated Node.js and TypeScript service built around Playwright, which works from rendered storefront pages.
Once products and variants have been extracted, local AI models suggest classifications and taxonomy tags. Those suggestions go through validation and manual review before entering the main catalogue, with an audit trail for checking how imported data was processed.
Bladefinity is live, with ongoing work on the product model and the tools for inspecting and correcting imported data.