The 163 entries were harvested and checked on 20 September 2026 (Sarasota–Bradenton carries three earlier dates, 18–20 September, ported from the hand-built source guide). Everything listed below is a change that was found during that harvest and is already reflected in the published data. There is no earlier published version to diff against, and none is invented here. From this date forward, every move gets its own entry.
The rule
How a date on this directory changes
The credibility of the whole directory rests on one rule, so it is stated plainly rather than buried:
- the checker proposes —
scripts/check-sources.mjsruns over every URL, records the HTTP status and the final URL after redirects, and writes a dated report - a person verifies — someone opens the flagged page in an ordinary browser and decides what actually happened
- a person re-dates — only then does the
checkeddate on an entry move, and the change is written here
The checker never silently rewrites an entry. Its own output says so: “This file proposes. It never rewrites a checked date. A date on the published page means a human opened the page.” A checked date on this directory means a person looked at that page on that day. It is not a crawl timestamp, and a script cannot produce one.
This matters because the automated signal is noisy in a specific, predictable way: several county and city hosts answer a script with 403 Access Denied while opening perfectly for a broker in a browser. If a script were allowed to act on that, the directory would fill with false “blocked” labels every week. It is not allowed to.
Since publication
Changes since the directory was published
An outside audit on 25 October 2026 found nine source URLs that no longer opened. Seven had moved and were found again, opened and re-dated. The other two are a server outage, listed under open proposals below.
| Date | Market | What changed | What we did |
|---|---|---|---|
| Charleston | City of Charleston permits moved from egcss.charleston-sc.gov to cityofcharlestonsc-energovweb.tylerhost.net. The old host now serves a “Citizen Self Service Has Moved” page. | URL updated. Opened the new portal, ran an address search (Exact Phrase is still ticked by default) and re-dated the entry. | |
| Tampa | Hillsborough County’s zoning layer moved into the DSD_Viewer_Services folder. The old service path returns “Service not found”. | URL updated; the layer answers a record count at its new path. Re-dated. | |
| Tampa | Pinellas County’s land use and zoning service moved into the PublicWebGIS folder. The old path returns “Service not found”. | URL updated; the unincorporated zoning layer answers at its new path. Re-dated. | |
| Orlando | Osceola County moved its map server from /arcgis/ to /hosting/. Every old service path, including parcels, zoning and future land use, returns 404. | Three URLs updated; each layer answers a record count at the new path with the same layer number. Re-dated. | |
| Jacksonville | FDOT’s Florida city-boundary layer moved out of its Boundaries folder. The old path returns “Service not found”. | URL updated; layer 7, Florida Cities Bndy, answers at the new path. Re-dated. |
The log
Changes recorded at first publication
Found while harvesting on 20 September 2026, and already applied to the published entries. Each one is a real move by the agency, not an edit of ours.
| Date | Market | What changed | What we did |
|---|---|---|---|
| Charleston | Charleston County moved from charlestoncounty.org to charlestoncounty.gov. The old hostname still redirects today. | Entries rewritten to the .gov hostname rather than left on a working redirect, because redirects are the first thing to lapse. | |
| Miami | The Miami-Dade Tax Collector is migrating to mdctaxcollector.gov. On the check date that host answered with a Cloudflare challenge and no page content. | The entry keeps the working miamidade.gov/taxcollector/ entry point. The new host is not published until a person can actually open it. | |
| Houston | HCAD’s parcel viewer moved from /parcelviewer/ to /parcel-viewer-v2.0/. | URL updated to the new path. | |
| Charlotte | Dropped: gastongov.com/572/Register-of-Deeds. It redirects off-site to a certificate vendor rather than to a county deed index. | Not published. The finding is carried as a gotcha on the entry that replaced it. | |
| Huntsville | Dropped: madisoncountyal.gov/services/flood-protection. It redirects to the public-works path, not to a flood lookup. | Not published; recorded as a gotcha instead. | |
| Huntsville | Dropped: limestonecounty.net. The host returns “Private Site”. | Not published; recorded as a gotcha instead. | |
| Charleston | City of Charleston CivicEngage page IDs go stale silently. Two guessed /NNNN/Name URLs resolved to unrelated pages — one to a staff directory, one to the South Carolina tourism site — while returning HTTP 200. | Standing rule adopted: no guessed numeric city page ID is ever published in this directory. City pages are navigated to from the home page and recorded as found. |
Three of the seven are candidate URLs that were removed before publication rather than corrections to something readers had already seen. They are logged anyway, because “we looked at this and it was wrong” is the part of a directory’s upkeep that normally goes unrecorded — and because a reader who finds the same URL elsewhere deserves to know it was checked and rejected, not missed.
The honest part
Open proposals the checker has raised
These are flags from check-sources.mjs that a person has not yet re-verified. Nothing here has moved a date. They are published while open rather than after they are resolved, because an unresolved flag is exactly the thing a maintained directory is tempted to hide.
| Raised | Source | Signal | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| City of Birmingham GIS — Zoning and Future Land Use (Birmingham) | HTTP 500, “SITE_NOT_INITIALIZED”, for every service on the city map server | Open. A server fault rather than a move: the server answers but cannot start its services. Both entries keep their 10 Oct 2026 date and now say so in their notes. To be rechecked. | |
| City of Franklin — Building & Neighborhood Services (Nashville) | HTTP 403 to an automated request | Open. Almost certainly an Akamai bot challenge, not a move — the page opens normally in a browser. Entry left at page opened and its date unchanged until a person confirms. | |
| City of Franklin — Planning & Sustainability zoning map (Nashville) | HTTP 403 to an automated request | Open, same cause. Date unchanged. |
The checker’s own note on both reads: “a challenge does not mean the source moved.” That is the distinction this page exists to preserve. Four hosts in the first five markets — charlottenc.gov, madisoncountyal.gov, limestonecounty-al.gov and franklintn.gov — refuse a bare automated request and answer normally to a full browser header set. They are not recorded as blocked, because they are not blocked for a broker.
Not a change — a standing state
Five sources that block a check outright
Distinct from the flags above: these five stayed shut even in a real browser session, and they are published with level blocked rather than quietly omitted. They are listed here so that a future entry recording one of them opening reads as the improvement it would be.
- Fulton County Tax Commissioner (Atlanta) — Cloudflare interstitial on every request
- Broward tax bill search (Miami) — bot-check interstitial on a third-party payment host
- HCAD Property Search (Houston) — held on “Performing security verification” across repeated attempts
- Williamson County TX property tax (Austin) — the whole
www.wilcotx.govhost returns 403 with a Cloudflare interstitial to anything scripted; the working search attax.wilcotx.govis listed separately and is not blocked - Madison County AL probate (Huntsville) — the root URL redirects to a Microsoft sign-in; no guest search was reached
One more thing belongs here even though it is not a block: the Davidson County Register of Deeds online index is a paid monthly subscription behind a username and password, stated on the county’s own .gov page. The most populous county in the Nashville market has no free online deed index. If that ever changes, it will be logged on this page.
Upkeep
Send a correction
Portals move constantly and nobody tracks it publicly. If a link in the directory is wrong, moved or now needs a login, tell us and we will check it and re-date the entry the same week. chris@sterlingdp.com — include the market, the agency and the URL. Please leave private client information out of it.
Re-verification is quarterly, with an automated link check in between. The link check can flag that a URL moved or started returning a challenge; it cannot change a date. A date moves only when the entry itself is re-checked, and when it does, it appears here.
The whole directory is published as one JSON file under CC BY 4.0, carrying the same checked dates you see on the pages.