I've put some effort over the last twelve hours into improving the appearence of The RinkAtlas Blog. I did this because I connected the blog to the front page of RinkAtlas.com for the first time.

I feel strongly that the user interface of the entire RinkAtlas website should be as consistent as possible. I hope you like the new look.

For Immediate Release

Contact:
Dave Aiello
RinkAtlas.com
+1-267-352-4305 office
+1-609-815-0405 mobile
daiello [at] rinkatlas.com

"RinkAtlas" On-Line Directory of North American Ice Rinks Successfully Launched

New Website Provides Door-to-Door Directions to Over 1,800 Ice Sports Facilities in the United States

Newtown, PA -- October 12, 2006 -- RinkAtlas, a new Internet-based directory of ice sports facilities, is up and running as of today. RinkAtlas is the only website that can provide door-to-door directions to any of the 1,800 ice sports facilities in the Continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. The website is on line now at http://www.rinkatlas.com/.

Dave Aiello, an experienced technology entrepreneur, is the lead developer of the RinkAtlas website. He is a 16-year veteran of the information technology consulting business and currently serves as president of Chatham Township Data Corporation.

RinkAtlas has a number of unique features that differentiate it from other Internet-based sources of ice rink information. RinkAtlas uses Google's Internet map technology (Google Maps) to provide accurate, high resolution maps for each ice arena in its database. This technology also allows RinkAtlas to provide turn-by-turn driving directions and satellite photos of each of these ice rinks. These features significantly improve RinkAtlas users' ability to locate arenas that they have never visited before.

One of the keys to making RinkAtlas.com the most popular rink directions website is to make it easier for webmasters operating hockey-related sites to provide maps and directions on their own websites. Over the past few days, I've built two widgets that do just that:

RinkAtlas Rink Information Widget

The RinkAtlas Rink Information Widget is the size of an IAB Vertical Rectangle ad unit (240 x 400). It lets you display a location map, the name, address, and telephone number for a pre-selected rink. In the lower left corner of the widget is a "Get Directions" button. If the Get Directions button is clicked, a new window is opened to the page on RinkAtlas corresponding to the selected rink. Door-to-door directions can be obtained from there.

You specify the rink to be displayed by the Rink Information Widget by inserting the Global Unique Identifier (guid) parameter in the widget configuration screen on the Widgetbox website. The guid for any rink in the RinkAtlas database can be found by looking at the URL produced by the "Link to this Page" button on the RinkAtlas toolbar.

The RinkAtlas Rink Information Widget is intended to be used on team information pages within hockey league or hockey news-related websites. It can also be used on a team's own website, or the website of a college sports information department.

RinkAtlas Rink Search Widget

The RinkAtlas Rink Search Widget is the size of an IAB Small Rectangle ad unit (180 x 150). It provides a text field and a "Search for Rink" button. If the Search for Rink button is clicked, a new window is opened to RinkAtlas and a search is performed using the contents of the text field as the search paramters.

The Rink Search Widget is perfect for inclusion on the sidebar of any hockey-related website or blog, particularly since this widget is the same size as many ads that appear in the sidebars of websites.

We believe that these widgets will meet the needs of most of the webmasters of hockey-related websites. However, we realize that some sites may have special needs or may want to integrate even more deeply with RinkAtlas. If your RinkAtlas integration plans go beyond what you can do with our widgets, contact Dave Aiello at daiello [at] rinkatlas.com.

It's my pleasure to note that RinkAtlas is now officially part of After6 Services, a new company that I started in January.  We just pushed a few minor changes to the RinkAtlas website that can be seen by our customers, one of which is the inclusion of "After6 Services LLC" in the Copyright notices.

We don't expect there to be any significant changes to the way that RinkAtlas operates, except that we hope that rink database additions and corrections get made faster.

If you notice that a rink in North America is missing from RinkAtlas, or that the information we provide about a rink is incorrect or out of date, please let me know by sending an email to daiello [at] rinkatlas.com.

Thanks,

Dave Aiello
Founder
RinkAtlas.com

CEO
After6 Services LLC

Map and directions display on RinkAtlas.com was interrupted from about 10:00pm Eastern Time on August 28, 2013 through to the morning of August 29. The problem was that we attempted to adopt a portion of our web framework that calls version 3 of the Google Maps API, and the functionality was not an exact match to the services that we use.

We reverted the framework changes, and will redeploy those changes once features such as map labels and directions are refactored.