A lot of people who commented on Guy Kawasaki's blog posting about RinkAtlas want to know when we plan to begin building our Canadian rink database. I've decided to start building it immediately, but I'm changing the order in which rinks are entered.

When we built the U.S. rink database, I compiled a list of rinks in each state. All rinks in a given state were entered in alphabetical order according to the city in which they are located.

We entered all the rinks in the Atlantic District of USA Hockey first (rinks in New Jersey, Delaware, and Eastern Pennsylvania). After that, I continued with the rinks in the New England, Southeastern, and MidAm Districts, and continued to enter rinks from east to west until we hit Alaska and Hawaii.

This process ensured that all of the rinks were entered in a logical order, but, it also meant that the West Coast wasn't completed until a few days ago.

I'm going to try to enter rinks in Canada by beginning with the arenas where NHL, AHL, and ECHL games are played. After that, I will add the rinks where teams in Canadian Major Junior Leagues play. Finally, we'll add the rinks used for recreational hockey, figure skating, and speed skating.

I hope that doing this improves the experience of using RinkAtlas while our Canadian database is under construction. At least there will be some rinks in the Western Provinces that appear in the database early on in the construction phase.

If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions about how to improve our database development process, feel free to leave a comment here or email me at daiello [at] rinkatlas.com.