UPDATE LOG
Everything that has changed.
ScholarAB is built in the open. This is what has changed since March 2, 2026, month by month, in plain English.
125
CHANGES WRITTEN UP
7
MONTHS IN
18 CHANGES
March 2026
Three weeks of building under two names that did not stick, then launch with 115 scholarships.
- UNDER THE HOOD The first plan, from late February, covered Medicine Hat only and ran off a spreadsheet.
- NEW Work starts March 2. A tool that builds a site from a description failed twice, so it was written by hand instead.
- NEW March 6: the four biggest Canadian scholarship sites were taken apart to see what to do differently. Five rules came out of it and all five are still here: no account, cards you can skim, the dollar total up front, and closing soonest first.
- UNDER THE HOOD The name changes that day: "ScholarHat" was already taken by a big training company. The next one used the 403 area code.
- NEW ScholarAB on March 14. The 403 idea was dropped because 403 means nothing to a student in Edmonton.
- IMPROVED One shared layout, so every page looks the same instead of being built separately.
- FIXED Scholarship cards would not line up on phones. The card had to be rebuilt from scratch.
- NEW A filter on March 16: pick the university you are heading to, and the list narrows to what fits.
- NEW The logo arrives March 17, with an icon for each region.
- NEW A teacher pointed out that students lose everything they find by the next day. Saving listings came out of that.
- UNDER THE HOOD The robots get written: retiring closed scholarships, and checking every link.
- IMPROVED March 22, the night before launch: one plain typeface everywhere, and a home page that points you somewhere instead of dumping the whole list on you.
- NEW scholarab.ca goes live that evening, with a preview picture for shared links.
- NEW March 23: ScholarAB opens to the public with 115 scholarships and 17 research programs. Browse everything, save what you like. No account, no login.
- NEW Saved listings stay on your own device. Nothing about you leaves it.
- NEW A bar along the bottom on phones, for jumping between sections.
- NEW The first guide: how to apply for scholarships in Alberta.
- UNDER THE HOOD Two robots start on launch day: one retires closed scholarships, one hunts for dead links.
11 CHANGES
April 2026
The busiest month by far: the match quiz, the program library, faster hosting.
- NEW The match quiz. Answer a few questions and get back only the scholarships you qualify for.
- NEW Page numbers on long lists, so the page stops loading a hundred cards at once.
- UNDER THE HOOD Listings moved into a database with a private admin screen. Before this, fixing a deadline meant editing the site's code.
- LISTINGS Research programs went from 17 to 97: summer labs and student placements.
- LISTINGS Scholarships grew from 113 to 148, adding awards for Red Deer and Lethbridge, with duplicates weeded out.
- IMPROVED Scholarships and programs ran on two sets of code that had drifted apart. Merged, so filtering, sorting and saving now behave the same on both.
- NEW Deadline alerts. Give an email address, get a reminder before a saved scholarship closes. Nothing else is ever sent.
- NEW A page for teachers and counsellors.
- NEW An About page, and the rules: no ads, no sponsored listings, no personal data.
- IMPROVED The site moved to Cloudflare, so pages come from somewhere near you.
- UNDER THE HOOD Link checks and browser tests now run on every change.
11 CHANGES
May 2026
A quieter month on accuracy: dead links, wrong counts, a broken scholarships page.
- FIXED The Cypress County agricultural bursary said nothing about who may apply. Its form counts urban areas inside the county boundary and names the City of Medicine Hat and Redcliff outright, so city students qualify after all. Its sibling scholarship, closing the same day, does not work that way.
- LISTINGS Red Deer gained 24 awards, most of them Red Deer Polytechnic entrance scholarships that one May application covers. Its award portal lists 520 opportunities and 519 of them are closed cycles for students already enrolled, so only the entrance awards are here.
- LISTINGS Lethbridge gained the awards its schools list but nobody else does, including a $10,000 Rotary agricultural scholarship and a YMCA scholarship that pays for a full lifeguard certification rather than tuition.
- FIXED 38 broken links repaired. 5 programs had shut down for good and were retired.
- FIXED The dollar total on the home page was counting closed scholarships. It now counts only money you can still apply for.
- FIXED The scholarships page had started showing "page not found" after a hosting change.
- FIXED The match quiz was ignoring the rules on newer listings, so some never matched.
- LISTINGS Seven scholarships added, including the Medicine Hat Firefighters Charitable Foundation Scholarship, bringing the site to 155.
- IMPROVED The match page now explains what the quiz does before you start.
- IMPROVED Questions with four or more answers now sit in two columns.
- FIXED The home page count was frozen at whatever it was when the site was last built. It now counts live.
10 CHANGES
June 2026
A design pass across the whole site, then a rebuild of the match quiz.
- IMPROVED Closed scholarships now carry a red CLOSED chip and stay in the All tab, so you can plan for next year.
- IMPROVED Listings sort in a sensible order: open now, opening later, then closed.
- IMPROVED A visual refresh: cards glow on hover, amounts sit in their own pill, the quiz shows progress dots.
- IMPROVED A filter that finds nothing now says so instead of going blank.
- FIXED The Previous button used to slide down the screen on longer questions, so you would reach for it and miss. It stays put now.
- IMPROVED Answer tiles lift when you hover them, so it is clear what you are picking.
- IMPROVED Moving between pages crossfades, and swiping left or right on a phone slides.
- LISTINGS Added the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, worth $250,000.
- FIXED Clear filters did not always clear everything.
- FIXED The overnight listing refresh had stopped running. Restarted.
20 CHANGES
July 2026
The biggest month since launch: a full redesign, the guides, a new logo, faster pages.
- FIXED The live site was building with 28 scholarships instead of the full set.
- NEW Search on the scholarships page, and sorting on the programs page.
- NEW A real 404 page. A mistyped address used to quietly serve the home page instead.
- IMPROVED Every main page was redesigned around a single look.
- UNDER THE HOOD Anonymous counting of which listings get opened. No names, emails, cookies or IP addresses.
- NEW The Guides section: eight write-ups on Rutherford, essays, reference letters, Grade 11 and 12 timelines, local awards and trades funding.
- NEW A "More like this" block at the bottom of every listing, so you do not have to go back to the list.
- NEW A new logo across the site, the browser tab, and shared links.
- NEW Every open scholarship gets its own share picture, so a link shows the actual award.
- IMPROVED 80 listing descriptions rewritten by hand.
- FIXED 18 dead links repaired.
- FIXED A timezone bug could show a scholarship as closed on its own deadline day.
- IMPROVED Pages send far less code to your browser, so they load faster on older phones.
- FIXED The match quiz was returning scholarships only, never research programs. Fixed, with five smaller bugs.
- NEW Research programs can now be saved straight from the match results.
- IMPROVED Unsubscribing from deadline alerts now confirms it worked.
- FIXED The Rutherford guide listed a deadline that does not officially exist. It was removed, and the guide now says when applications open instead.
- FIXED The Mehl and Wolf deadlines were corrected against their official pages.
- NEW An app-style layout for phones, with your saved listings carried over.
- IMPROVED You now choose when alert reminders arrive.
28 CHANGES
August 2026
The 2026-27 refresh, 37 new research programs, a rebuilt phone home page, a privacy and safety pass over the whole site, and a listing count that more than doubled in the last week.
- FIXED The Rural Municipalities of Alberta scholarship had two entries, one of them added days earlier during the Cochrane pass with the wrong amount and the wrong cutoff. RMA gives six awards of $1,500 closing at the end of August, and the surviving record says so.
- LISTINGS Provincial, national and city awards were all rolled forward to the 2026-27 cycle. As of August 2, nothing on the site reads closed.
- LISTINGS 37 research and enrichment programs were added: trades and apprenticeship, math and physics contests, Model UN and youth parliament, Space Apps, Rise, Explore and the House of Commons Page Program.
- LISTINGS All 86 program pages were read end to end. Programs that pointed at a provider home page now point at the page that actually describes them, and the verified stamp on 45 of them was re-checked by hand.
- LISTINGS Listings now say when applications open rather than only "DATE TBA", and 154 awards that were being called open are no longer.
- FIXED The last two dead addresses were repaired. All 251 links now work.
- NEW Every award page lists the four real steps of applying, so you can tick them off.
- NEW Three guides now cover the programs side: research placements that pay, how to get medical experience in high school, and which computing contests are free.
- IMPROVED Search results were showing half a description on 25 program pages. They now use the whole line Google gives them.
- UNDER THE HOOD Each page now tells search engines the day its own content changed, rather than 308 pages sharing one date.
- NEW A home page built for phones, after the old app-style mobile layout was taken back out.
- IMPROVED The match quiz carries your answers over from the home page teaser, and each result now says why it ranked where it did.
- IMPROVED Filters say how many listings are left, deadlines are shaded by how close they are, and every page shares one width.
- IMPROVED The skip link, the focus outlines and the site banner work properly for anyone using a keyboard or a screen reader.
- IMPROVED Deadline reminders now ask you to confirm your email before anything is sent, and every reminder carries a one-click unsubscribe.
- IMPROVED 112 scholarship pages had been quietly hidden from Google. They are indexable again, and the sitemap no longer lists pages it tells Google to skip.
- IMPROVED Page titles and descriptions were rewritten to answer the question in the search result itself, instead of five awards sharing one line.
- UNDER THE HOOD The project was licensed: the code is open source, and the listing data can be reused with credit.
- UNDER THE HOOD A privacy pass: IP addresses are no longer stored, search text that is kept is now disclosed, and 695 educator email addresses were taken out of the public data.
- UNDER THE HOOD Terms of use were published, every page says plainly that a listing can be wrong or out of date, and the security page now explains what happens if data ever leaks.
- FIXED Admin logins are capped across all addresses, admin sessions expire, and the rate limits count properly instead of losing writes.
- LISTINGS The last week of the month more than doubled the site: 153 scholarships became 345. Almost all of the new ones are city awards, read one at a time against the organisation that funds them, across Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge, Red Deer, Medicine Hat, Grande Prairie and Airdrie.
- NEW Airdrie and Grande Prairie got pages of their own, and province-wide and national awards now have the same kind of page the cities have.
- IMPROVED Every filter says how many listings are behind it before you click, and a city chip now takes you to that city instead of filtering where you stand.
- IMPROVED The quiz asks which school you go to, where the city has awards tied to one, and it forgets your answers when you close the tab.
- IMPROVED Search results lead with what an award is worth. 73 of them used to open on "Not open yet", which told you nothing.
- IMPROVED The emoji came off the category and program pages, the hub intros were cut to one sentence, and the chip rows stopped jumping between pages.
- UNDER THE HOOD Changed pages are announced to search engines within minutes of a deploy, and a weekly check now reports which pages are actually indexed rather than assuming.
27 CHANGES
September 2026
Seventeen new city pages, for St. Albert, Brooks, Spruce Grove, Leduc, Fort Saskatchewan, Chestermere, Beaumont, Lloydminster, Camrose, Cold Lake, Lacombe, Wetaskiwin, Fort McMurray, Grande Prairie, Sherwood Park, Okotoks and Cochrane, a much deeper Edmonton page, three more guides, the Trades and Tech hub back where it belongs, and a match quiz that asks more and returns more.
- NEW A new guide names nine scholarships that are still on Alberta counsellor lists and no longer exist. One is the Jeremy Dias Scholarship, whose charity went bankrupt in October 2024. Only one of the nine admits on its own page that it has closed, so a link that loads proves nothing.
- LISTINGS Cochrane has a page, with the Rotary U-START bursary at $5,000 as the largest award in the town. Thirteen of its listings run through one printed application package at Cochrane High, and six existing Rocky View and Bow Valley awards now say they are open to Cochrane students too.
- LISTINGS Okotoks has a page, and it arrives with 52 awards. Foothills Composite publishes a handbook naming every award it hands out, from a $100 diploma bonus to a $1,500 yearbook scholarship, which is a level of disclosure almost no other Alberta school matches.
- LISTINGS Edmonton gained 25 school awards, the first the city page has carried from individual high schools rather than the two divisions. They include a $16,000 mathematics scholarship at Eastglen, seven awards at Jasper Place, and grade 10 and 11 awards at St. Oscar Romero, which almost nothing else in the directory is open to.
- FIXED A male-only award was matching every student in the quiz. The eligibility schema only accepted female, so the whole criteria object was thrown away on the one listing that did not fit, taking its grade and subject filters with it.
- LISTINGS Sherwood Park and Strathcona County now have a page, built out of the two award lists their high schools publish in full. The five Elk Island division awards that were filed under Fort Saskatchewan are open to Sherwood Park students too, and now say so.
- LISTINGS Grande Prairie finally has the page this changelog claimed it had back in April. Its 33 awards were sitting under the province-wide list, and the entrance awards at Northwestern Polytechnic have been added beside them.
- LISTINGS Fort McMurray and Wood Buffalo now have 76 awards and a page of their own, most of them out of the Keyano College award book, alongside the Fort McMurray Public School District awards and the municipal youth citizenship award.
- LISTINGS Wetaskiwin and Wetaskiwin County now have a page of their own, built out of the one application form that Wetaskiwin Composite High School uses for every award it hands out, plus the county bursaries and the service club money beside it.
- LISTINGS Lacombe and Lacombe County now have 60 awards and a page of their own, out of the Lacombe Composite awards list, the Wolf Creek division awards and the entrance awards at Burman University.
- LISTINGS Cold Lake and the Lakeland now have 22 awards and a page of their own, including three military scholarships for the families serving at 4 Wing.
- LISTINGS Camrose and Camrose County now have 53 awards and a page of their own, out of the Camrose Composite handbook, the service clubs and the Augustana entrance awards.
- LISTINGS Lloydminster on the Alberta side now has 46 awards and a page of their own, 32 of which share a single application and a single May 1 deadline.
- LISTINGS Chestermere now has a page of its own, built on the three awards Chestermere High collects and the Calgary-region money that names the city.
- LISTINGS Fort Saskatchewan and the Elk Island schools now have 21 awards and a page of their own, including two worth $5,000 that a thrift store pays for.
- LISTINGS Leduc, Leduc County and Devon now have 16 awards and a page of their own, five of which close between now and the end of October.
- LISTINGS Beaumont has been split out of the Leduc page into nine awards of its own, since Beaumont is a city rather than part of Leduc County and the county bursaries never applied to it.
- LISTINGS Spruce Grove, Stony Plain and Parkland County now have 30 awards and a page of their own, out of the two Parkland high schools and the ag society.
- LISTINGS St. Albert and Sturgeon County now have 46 awards and a page of their own, including the four scholarships the Humboldt Broncos families endowed.
- LISTINGS Brooks and the County of Newell now have 26 awards and a page of their own, read one at a time out of the Brooks Composite scholarship handbook.
- NEW Three new guides: the Loran Award, chemistry competitions across Canada, and how volunteering hours actually work in Alberta high schools.
- NEW Trades and Tech is a field again, with a page of its own rather than a filter buried in a list.
- IMPROVED The match quiz asks two more questions it already knew how to use, and shows up to 20 matches instead of stopping at ten.
- IMPROVED Matches are ranked on what actually separates one award from another, not on how much detail a listing happens to carry.
- IMPROVED The field chips open the field from the programs side too, and the home page city row fits on one line again.
- FIXED 149 pages were opening their search result on a date nobody can act on, and three page titles were still promising 2026 when most deadlines are 2027.
- FIXED A listing that existed twice was merged, and the build now refuses to ship a category that does not exist.