A few days ago my friend Matt Leaf from USA Hockey suggested that RinkAtlas needed additional search capabilities for times when our customers didn't know the name of the rink they were trying to locate.

I know that when I played youth hockey years ago we had this problem at least once. My team scheduled a trip to Boston and played a series of games at the rink now known as Matthews Arena, where Northeastern University plays.

In those days the arena was generally known as Boston Arena, but was also referred to by some people as "The Old Boston Garden", since it was the original home of the Boston Bruins and the Boston Celtics.

I don't think the Internet, as we know it today, existed back then. However, I can see that was a case where we would have needed a location-based search capability rather than a rink name-based search.

Here are the features I added to the RinkAtlas search tool:

• Search by City and State: Now if you type "Boston, MA" or "Philadelphia PA", you'll get a list of all of the rinks in the RinkAtlas database with addresses in that city.
• Search by Five Digit Zip Code: If you type "12180" (the main five digit Zip Code for Troy, NY), or some other Zip Code, you'll get a list of rinks in the RinkAtlas database that are physically located within that Zip Code.
• Search by State Abbreviation: If you type a two letter state abbreviation, you'll get a list of all of the rinks located in that state. That's potentially hundreds of rinks in states like Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota, but might make sense for some of the states where there are few indoor ice facilities.

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.

Guy Kawasaki, the man who coined the phrase software evangelism is a rabid hockey fan. Although he only picked up the sport four years ago, he's now on the ice five days a week.

I didn't know these details about Guy's hockey participation until I emailed him to make him aware of RinkAtlas. All I knew was that he'd mentioned hockey on his blog a number of times over the past year.

Anyway, he checked out RinkAtlas and liked it so much that he posted a very favorable blog entry about it:

In case you hadn’t noticed, I love hockey. A buddy named Dave Aiello just told me about a website that he created called RinkAtlas.

He used the Google Maps API and verified and corrected the geocoding to over 1,800 rinks in the fifty states and Puerto Rico. If you ever need to find a rink, this is the site to use. It’s the first mashup that I’ve found useful. :-) ....

Guy's blog entry caused an immediate jump in our traffic. I didn't expect to receive such a rave from a prominent member of the Silicon Valley community. All I can say at the moment is "thank you, Guy."