What's new
Alberta Daily is built in the open and changes most weeks. This is what has landed recently, what we are still trying to get permission to publish, and where a reader can genuinely help.
Last updated August 22, 2026.
- ✨ New
Alberta's energy pages now have one home
A new section gathers the four energy pages: where the province's electricity is coming from, where the power is out, oil and gas prices, and the regulated rates on your bill. The grid page also now shows the system marginal price — the price of the next megawatt, which is the live figure the hourly pool price averages out.
- ✨ New
You can now see where Alberta's electricity is coming from
A new page shows the province's generation mix live — how much is coming from gas, wind, solar, hydro and the rest — plus the pool price and whether Alberta is importing or exporting power. The figures are the AESO's, used with their agreement; the percentages are ours and say so. Not the outage map: this is where power comes from, not where it is off.
- 🩹 Fixed
The ad-free pages are now ad-free however you get to them
A few pages carry no advertising because the people whose data they show require it — the avalanche map, the power grid page, the road and camera pages. That held if you opened one directly, but not if you clicked through from elsewhere — from the new energy section to the grid page, say — where Google's ad code stayed loaded from the page before. Those pages now start fresh.
- 🩹 Fixed
"12 full closure" now reads "12 full closures"
The line at the top of each live map counts what's on it — and it was pasting the filter names in as written, so most maps read "12 full closure, 3 partial / lane closure". Every map now words its own counts properly at one and at many.
- ✨ New
Avalanche danger ratings are on the site
Avalanche Canada gave us written permission, so the avalanche danger map is live — Kananaskis, Banff and Lake Louise, Jasper, Waterton and Rogers Pass. Ratings show in Avalanche Canada's own wording, never reworded, each linking their full forecast. It is summer, so every region reads "Summer Conditions" until late fall. Never enter avalanche terrain on the strength of a map.
- ✨ New
The outage map now covers rural and central Alberta
FortisAlberta gave us written permission, so the outage map is no longer Edmonton-only — it now covers their rural and central service area, about 558,000 customers. Their planned work shows separately in blue: power scheduled to go off later, never counted as an outage. Calgary (ENMAX) and ATCO areas still aren't permitted, so an empty area there isn't the same as no outages.
- 🔧 Improved
The quiz got much bigger — and every question was re-checked
The daily quiz went from ten questions to 69, so it stops repeating itself. Before any of the new ones went live we checked them all against original sources — Environment Canada's climate archive, the Provincial Archives, city archives, Parks Canada — and corrected 26 explanations with details wrong. Every question now cites a primary source instead of Wikipedia.
- 🔧 Improved
Share cards now carry the Rockies
When a story or the daily briefing is shared — on Facebook or anywhere else — the preview card now shows Moraine Lake fading behind the headline instead of a plain blue panel. The photo is the same CC-licensed Andrea Belvedere image as our homepage, credited on every card.
- ✨ New
Alberta Daily is on Facebook
The morning and evening briefings now post to our Facebook Page, along with big stories as they land and emergency alerts as they're issued — weather-warning posts carry a map of the affected areas. The link is in the footer of every page.
- ✨ New
Where you're allowed to sled
The 38 hills Calgary, Edmonton and Grande Prairie designate for tobogganing, mapped, with the safety rules that come with them. Designated means somebody looked at what's at the bottom of the hill — it doesn't mean supervised.
- ✨ New
Every highway camera in the province, on one page
Hundreds of Alberta 511 cameras as a wall instead of a map — the mountain passes first, then the cities, then the long rural stretches. Pictures come straight from 511 and refresh about once a minute.
- 🩹 Fixed
Counts of one now read as one thing.
A quiet day could produce "1 weather alerts in effect" on the live pages, the homepage strip and the newsletter. Every count now uses the proper singular — "1 weather alert", "1 road closure", "1 fire ban, restriction or advisory".
- 📌 Note
We checked eighteen more news sources. We can use none of them yet.
Rural municipal news, farm papers, oil and gas trade press, the province's own newsroom — all measured, all blocked or unclear on their own terms. The province's newsroom would be the biggest win on the site, so we've written to ask. Until somebody says yes in writing, we don't take it.
- ✨ New
The roadside attractions are on a map now
Every giant pysanka, perogy and landing pad in the directory, pinned, with directions from each one. Most entries also gained a line about what you're actually looking at — and two came off the list: the Calgary "bighorn sheep" turned out to be live sheep at the zoo, and nobody outside a single map entry could confirm Cold Lake's moose exists.
- ✨ New
Four more things about Alberta, explained
What a chinook actually is and why it warms up coming downhill; why Alberta has no sales tax and the sixteen months in 1936 when it did; what a quonset is and how a US Navy building became a prairie word; and why the winter sky grows sundogs, haloes and pillars. Every claim linked to where it came from.
- 📌 Note
The editorial policy now covers sports, minors and Indigenous communities
Rules we were already following are now written where you can hold us to them: under-18 sport is covered at team level only, betting content is banned outright, and cultural events are described in the organizer's own framing — never embellished by AI.
- ✨ New
The weekly question
One light question about living here, every week — never politics. Your answer stays in your browser; we don't collect votes, so there's no tally and we won't invent one. Written replies via the contact page can run in the newsletter.
- ✨ New
The daily Alberta quiz is open
Five questions a day, one at a time, every answer explained and linked to its source. Keep a streak going, and a perfect score earns confetti. All ten opening questions were fact-checked against fetched sources before going live — three were corrected in the process.
- ✨ New
Somewhere in Alberta — a daily guessing game
One photograph of somewhere in the province each day. Five guesses, each miss tells you how far and which way — and solving it earns confetti and a streak. Nothing about you is stored anywhere but your own browser, and the shareable result has no place names in it.
- ✨ New
Alberta explained
Plain answers to things people actually wonder about, written here and linked to their sources. First up: why the province has no rats — and why "rat-free" does not mean what most people think it means.
- ✨ New
A Chinook counter for the season
The Chinook page now keeps a running count of the winter — separate Chinooks, days, the longest stretch and the most recent. It starts filling in when the season does, in October, and says plainly how long it has been watching.
- ✨ New
How much daylight we're getting
Sunrise, sunset and day length for eight cities, and how many minutes each one gained or lost overnight. Fort McMurray gets nearly two hours more than Lethbridge in June — the gap is worth watching.
- ✨ New
Alberta's ghost towns
Lille, Mountain Park, Sharples and Anthracite — places the coal left behind. Rowley, Dorothy, Wayne and Retlaw get their own section, because they turn up on ghost-town lists constantly and people actually live there.
- ✨ New
Roadside attractions
Eighteen big strange things beside Alberta's highways, from the Vegreville pysanka to the Torrington Gopher Hole Museum, each with directions and a link to check the location.
- ✨ New
Public health advisories
Outbreak and exposure notices by health zone, shown exactly as the province issues them. When we cannot read the official page in full we say so rather than showing a short list as if it were complete.
- ✨ New
The Alberta crop report
Soil moisture, crop conditions and pasture by region, with the five-year average alongside so the numbers mean something. Updated through the growing season; the page says plainly when it is between seasons.
- ✨ New
Small-town event calendars
Ten municipalities' own event calendars now feed the events page — Cardston, Edson, Beaumont, Bonnyville, Leduc, Redcliff, Provost, Wabasca and two counties.
- ✨ New
The rodeo hub
The professional season calendar in one place, with the amateur circuits that nothing else aggregates — 48 of the 59 stops are in Alberta.
- 📌 Note
Council coverage is being tested before it publishes
We are summarizing what small-town councils decide, from their own published minutes. Nothing is live yet: it runs in a review mode first, because closed-session items have to be removed by software before anything is summarized — never by asking an AI to skip them.
- 🩹 Fixed
Counts across the site now agree with each other
The fire-ban count on the homepage disagreed with the one on the map. Every number a page prints now comes from one place, and a test fails the build if a page starts counting on its own.
- 🔧 Improved
Advertorial kept out of the news feed
Sponsored posts that arrive through legitimate news feeds are now screened out before they reach the site.
What we're waiting on
A fair amount of Alberta information is published openly but licensed in a way that stops us relaying it. We do not work around that — if a source says no, or says nothing clearly enough, we leave it alone and ask. These are the asks currently outstanding:
- Council minutes from eleven more towns. Edson, Hinton, Camrose, Cochrane and others publish their agendas through a platform whose terms block automated readers entirely. We have asked; until they say yes, those councils are not covered.
- Alberta Health Services. AHS publishes boil-water and beach water-quality advisories, and it is the only source in the province that does. Its terms permit personal use only, so we link them rather than list them.
- Rodeo results and standings. Permission is confirmed for most of the season. One sanctioning body's terms are ambiguous, so its results stay off the site until that is settled in writing.
How you can help
- Tell us when we're wrong.A wrong date, a place described badly, an attraction that came down years ago — corrections are the most useful thing anyone sends us, and they get fixed the same day.
- If you work for a town, county or agency and your public information is not on the site, it is almost always a licence question rather than a technical one. A short note giving permission is usually all it takes.
- Tell somebody about a page. The small-town pages exist because nothing else covers those places. They only matter if the people there find them.
Anything above — corrections, permissions, or a source worth adding — goes to the contact page. How the site decides what it will and will not publish is set out in the editorial policy, and every source is listed on the sources page.