2008-03-22: Spring Cleaning

Some of our visitors have noticed a few recent improvements and re-arrangements that have taken place over the last couple of months. We've moved to a new ISP in order to improve reliability and advertising has been rearranged a bit to provide improved value to our advertisers and help pay for the internet bills.

A building search has been created on each region page which searches the specific region and all sub-regions, though I expect most people will use the one on the front page. This search mechanism will eventually be expanded to cover complexes.

The name you contribute under can now be essentially anything, per request from the RWTC Webmaster. Please Contact UrbanDB if you want your contributor name to appear differently.

Finally, in preparation for our trip to photograph Vancouver, we have purchased and been using improved camera gear for our Toronto construction updates. We hope to bring the Vancouver building data up to the same level of completeness that Toronto has received.

Most of the features from my development list have been substantially completed with a few more improvements to the editing forms to go. If you have a feature or feature set you would like to see UrbanDB provide, please contact us.

2007-12-19: UrbanDB in 2008

A few years ago when UrbanDB was conceived a substantial todo list was compiled. There are a few items remaining such as generating RSS feeds and improving search capabilities but a large bulk of the background work has been completed.

Foreground work, such as improving the interfaces, will be a slow and evolutionary process but we look forward to making the website easier to navigate and ensure the content you want to see bubbles to the top. We will maintain the encyclopedia feel to the website to keep it very fast and non-cluttered.

Our database will be expanding shortly. We have already begun researching Calgary buildings and intend to cover additional Canadian cities once some momentum for Calgary has picked up. Toronto, which is thoroughly documented, will be receiving a large number of additional reference points that are currently within the paper records and not yet online.