We've just completed the database for the State of Maine, giving RinkAtlas.com coverage of all of New England. This brings the total number of rinks in our database to exactly 600 and provides full coverage of the following states:

• Maine
• New Hampshire
• Vermont
• Massachusetts
• Rhode Island
• Connecticut
• New York
• New Jersey
• Pennsylvania
• Delaware

This corresponds to the New England, Massachusetts, New York, and Atlantic Districts of USA Hockey.

We will proceed with building the database for the Southeast District next. This should be a much quicker process, since there are so many fewer rinks in that area at this time.

After I finished entering the rinks in New England, I knew that the rest of the East Coast would be done quite quickly. This morning I finished entering the rinks in Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi, so now the RinkAtlas database covers all of the Southeast, the Mid-Atlantic States, and New England.

For those of you who need more specifics, the database includes all rinks in the following 23 states (listed alphabetically):

• Alabama,
• Arkansas,
• Connecticut,
• Delaware,
• The District of Columbia,
• Florida,
• Georgia,
• Kentucky,
• Louisiana,
• Maine,
• Maryland,
• Massachusetts,
• Mississippi,
• New Hampshire,
• New Jersey,
• New York,
• North Carolina,
• Pennsylvania,
• Rhode Island,
• South Carolina,
• Tennessee,
• Vermont,
• Virginia, and
• West Virginia.

A little while ago, RinkAtlas.com hit 1,000 rinks in its database. For the record, the 1,000th rink was Hoffman Estates Park District Community Center & Ice Arena in Hoffman Estates, Illinois.

We're about half done with Illinois now. The database contains now contains rinks in the following states (listed alphabetically):

• Alabama,
• Arkansas,
• Connecticut,
• Delaware,
• The District of Columbia,
• Florida,
• Georgia,
• Illinois [partial],
• Indiana,
• Kentucky,
• Louisiana,
• Maine,
• Maryland,
• Massachusetts,
• Michigan,
• Mississippi,
• New Hampshire,
• New Jersey,
• New York,
• North Carolina,
• Ohio,
• Pennsylvania,
• Rhode Island,
• South Carolina,
• Tennessee,
• Vermont,
• Virginia, and
• West Virginia.

We just finished entering over 100 rinks in the State of Wisconsin into the RinkAtlas.com database. This means that all of the rinks in states that are entirely east of the Mississippi River a re in the database.

So far 1,137 rinks are in our database.

We completed the entry of all rinks in USA Hockey's Central District. For those of you who are not familiar with the district boundaries, the Central District includes:

• Illinois
• Wisconsin
• Missouri
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Nebraska

This blog will probably go quiet for a while now, because we will be working on the entry of rinks in the State of Minnesota. There are almost 500 rinks in that state, when you count indoor and outdoor rinks.

I developed a new logo for RinkAtlas today. You can see it below:

I added a face-off circle to the left side of the logo, and removed the ".com" from the end of RinkAtlas. I think this improves the user experience a bit by making the site look a little more professional and finished. I still think we need a navigation bar near the top of the screen, but I have to figure out the right way to implement that. Stay tuned.

I'm pleased to announce that we finished entering all of the currently usable rinks in Minnesota today. I phrase it that way because I decided to skip about half of the outdoor rinks that are maintained by city parks and recreation departments. There's no way that those rinks can be used before late October or early November anyway, and I wanted to move on to complete the database for the rinks in the western states.

Once we're done with the entry of rinks in the Rocky Mountain and Pacific Districts of USA Hockey, I'll come back to Minnesota and enter the remaining park rinks. I'm very confident that this can be completed before the outdoor skating season starts.

As long as I can find time to work on RinkAtlas database building, we should rapidly approach completion of the database now that we have Minnesota under our belts.

Today we completed the entry of all of the indoor rinks in the Minnkota and Rocky Mountain Districts of USA Hockey. These districts include the following states:

• Minnesota
• North Dakota
• South Dakota
• Oklahoma
• Texas
• Montana
• Wyoming
• Colorado
• New Mexico
• Arizona
• Utah
• Idaho

This phase of RinkAtlas database development went pretty quickly. Most of these states (apart from Minnesota, North Dakota, and Texas) had 40 or fewer rinks. Some states (like Idaho and New Mexico) had a seven rinks or less in the entire state. I guess there's a lot of room for growth in ice sports in those states.

We hit a major milestone with RinkAtlas today. With the entry of Fort Wainwright Ice Arena on the military base of the same name outside of Anchorage, Alaska, we completed the RinkAtlas database of U.S. indoor ice rinks. We can now move on to review the database to make sure that we didn't miss any rinks that should be there.

We're now going to start marketing RinkAtlas a lot more intensely. I feel like this is a real product now that we have a nationwide database.

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.

RinkAtlas is partnering with Widgetbox for widget integration services. We think that the services available at Widgetbox.com to help webmasters place our widgets on to their web pages are very helpful.

The best way to see the Widgetbox widget integration services is to go to the RinkAtlas pages in the Widgetbox Widget Gallery, preview our widgets, and try one or more of them out on one of your web pages. Here are the Widgetbox Widget Gallery pages for RinkAtlas Widgets:

• RinkAtlas Rink Information Widget
• RinkAtlas Rink Search Widget

For more detailed information about the RinkAtlas Widgets, please refer to RinkAtlas Widgets Help Hockey Webmasters Provide Directions to Rinks.

I'm pleased to announce that College Hockey News has integrated RinkAtlas maps and directions into its comprehensive schedule of NCAA Division I mens' college hockey games. This qualifies them to be our first website partner under the RinkAtlas Partners Program.

I was really impressed with how quickly the integration was implemented by CHN, but their blog article announcing this partnership indicates that they've been wanting to provide good maps and directions for a long time. They said:

We've been looking to do something like this for some time, and when we learned about RinkAtlas, it seemed like a no brainer....

If you've seen Google Maps (and by now, who hasn't), RinkAtlas will be very familiar to you. In addition, what we like most about the site is that its accuracy comes through verification of satellite coordinates, so you don't have to worry about having the correct street address for an arena.

CHN is one of the largest hockey news sites in the United States and we are honored that they chose to partner with us.

I'm pleased to announce that the RinkAtlas database now includes all of the rinks used by the Maritime Junior 'A' Hockey League, the Ligue de Hockey Junior AAA du Quebec, and the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. These are the eastern-most junior hockey leagues in Canada.

An example of the recent additions is the Centre recreatif Joe Juneau that is home to the St. Lawrence Lions of the Ligue de Hockey Junior AAA du Quebec. The Centre recreatif Joe Juneau is in Pont-Rouge, Quebec (which is former RPI and Montreal Canadians' star Joe Juneau's hometown).

We are now moving on to building the database of rinks used by Junior teams and leagues in Ontario. We hope to be able to announce the completion of those additions to our database soon.

I've just added an auto-suggestion feature to the RinkAtlas search box. If you start typing the name of a rink, the name of a city, or a zip or postal code, RinkAtlas will search its database and show you a dynamically-generated list of search suggestions. You can either choose one of the suggestions or continue typing more characters.

The suggestions provided by RinkAtlas may include:

• Rink names,
• City and state pairs and city and province pairs,
• State and province abbreviations,
• ZIP and postal codes.

The suggestion list is ordered alphabetically, so you may see some unusual choices at the top of the list when you have only typed a couple of characters into the search box.

The auto-suggestion feature is a work in progress. There are a few things that I'd like to change and/or clarify already. However, I wanted to get this feature into production so that you could use it and let me know what you think of it.

If you have any comments or questions about the auto-suggestion feature, please email me at daiello [at] rinkatlas.com.

I'm pleased to announce that the RinkAtlas database now includes all of the arenas in The Ontario Hockey League (OHL). The OHL is one of three Major Junior "A" hockey leagues in Canada that are collectively called Canadian Hockey League (CHL). There are 20 teams in the OHL, including 17 that are located in Ontario, two that are located in Michigan and one that is located in Erie, PA.

We previously the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League to our database. See RinkAtlas Adds the Rinks from MJAHL, LHJAAAQ, and QMJHL for more information.

We can now move on to the Western Hockey League to complete our Major Junior "A" rink database.

I'm pleased to announce that the RinkAtlas database now includes all of the arenas in The Ontario Provincial Junior Hockey League (OPJHL or OHA), Northern Ontario Junior Hockey League, and Superior International Junior Hockey League. These are the Ontario-based member leagues of the Canadian Junior A Hockey League.

We previously added The Maritime Junior A Hockey League and Ligne de Hockey Junior AAA du Quebec to our database at this level of Juniors. See RinkAtlas Adds the Rinks from MJAHL, LHJAAAQ, and QMJHL for more information.

We can now move on to the leagues in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia to complete our Canadian Junior Hockey rink database.

I finally fixed the bug in the web version of RinkAtlas that reversed the endpoints of your trip if you asked for directions "From here", meaning from a rink in our database to another address.

If you tried this feature before and weren't satisfied, now it works.

Please let me know if you see any other problems with RinkAtlas or you have a feature suggestion. Send me email at daiello [at] rinkatlas.com.

RinkAtlas now supports social bookmarking through our "Bookmark & Share" button on the toolbar. This feature allows you to bookmark rink locations in Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook, MySpace, and about 30 other sites.

This feature is made possible through AddThis, a company that specializes in social network integration tools. AddThis is a local company in my area, and I've met with two of the company's executives in recent weeks. I like what they're doing, and I think it provides real value to RinkAtlas users.

The server where RinkAtlas is hosted experienced a pretty serious hardware problem early on Sunday, July 6, 2008. The server was restored late last night, but some additional tweaking had to be done to the LAMP stack on the restored server.

Everything seems to be running well now. If you notice any issues that you'd like to report, please email me at daiello [at] rinkatlas.com.

Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

It's hard to believe that RinkAtlas was down again on October 28 and 29, 2008. The server we run on, which is conservatively managed and sits in a Tier I hosting facility had it's second major hardware problem in less than four months.

It takes a bit of time to restore RinkAtlas because some of its functions depend upon PHP modules which are in a public code repository, but are not part of the default installation of PHP. We are documenting the restoration process more completely in case we ever need to use it again.

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

Please note that searches for Bill Gray's Regional Iceplex in Rochester, NY are not working correctly through the search box at the top of the RinkAtlas home page. We are aware of the problem.

You can find this arena by visiting the following URL:

http://www.rinkatlas.com/?guid=149&source=linkto

We're sorry for the error and we will work to correct the problem soon.

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.

We had a number of nagging errors in the RinkAtlas Web UI and iOS UI resulting from PHP warnings that weren't handled correctly. All of those errors have been fixed.

If you see any errors that result in page display problems, please comment and let us know.

Thanks to the RinkAtlas users around North America who pointed out that Google Maps was generating incorrect directions when a request was made through RinkAtlas. The problem has been corrected.