1. The town’s licence list
Each town publishes the businesses it has licensed. The register copies the business name, the licence number, the kind of business as the town writes it, and the date it went on the list. Last read 27 Oct 2026.
The list also holds a street address for each business. The register does not show it.
2. The business’s own website
Where the register finds a website, a program reads its pages and copies what they state: phone, email, hours, services, how the business describes itself, links to its social pages, and an address when the site publishes one. Each copied line keeps the page it came from and the time it was read.
- It makes one request a second to a site, uses no cookies, fills no forms and logs in nowhere.
- It obeys the site’s robots.txt. A page the site asks robots not to read is not read.
- Each site is due to be read again every month, so a changed website changes the entry, with the new date.
What the register does not say
- It does not say a business is open. A licence on the list is not proof of trading.
- It does not say when a business was founded. The list gives the date a licence went on it, and the register says exactly that.
- It does not choose between two names on one website. It shows both.
- It shows no street address unless the business’s own website published one.
What a fix can contain
A fix names the business and says what the entry should show. The form on the fix page and a program send the same thing to POST /fix/send. A fix can be about the phone, email, hours, address, service, description, website or name, or ask for the entry to be removed.
An owner’s assistant can file one as JSON. Send Content-Type: application/json and an object with these fields:
{"licence": "12345", "business": "Example Plumbing", "field": "phone",
"should": "250 555 0100", "reach": "owner@example.com"}fieldis one of phone, email, hours, address, service, description, website, name, licence, other or remove.reachis the phone or email we reply on. It is used for the reply and nothing else.- A fix that is accepted answers
201with{"ok": true, "id": 7}. A fix with a problem answers400with{"ok": false, "problems": [...]}, and says what to change.
Credits
Business names from the City of Vernon business licence list, read 27 Oct 2026.
Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – City of Kelowna.
Business names from the District of Peachland business licence list, read 27 Oct 2026.
Business names from the Town of Osoyoos business directory, read 27 Oct 2026.
Who makes it
The Okanagan register is made by Mackenzie Bowes, who lives on the west side between Vernon and Kelowna and builds websites for local businesses (webdesignvernon.com). Corrections and questions go to him: mackenzie@mackenziebowes.com.
Where it can be wrong
A website can be out of date, and the register copies it as it is. Some websites draw their pages in the browser, and the program cannot read those yet. Entries say so. A website can also list other people’s phone numbers, so the register shows at most two and says how many the site lists.