The Register, six months on

Six months after the first workshop at the long table on Fennell Quay, the Register's volunteers keep their own website, and nobody needs to post a card to anyone. What they have done without us since launch, what we would change if we started again, and what comes next for the Register and for us.

Six months ago we sat at a long table on Fennell Quay with six card drawers open in front of us and asked what a building is. The Register's website has been live for four weeks now. This is a look back, and a look at what the volunteers have been doing without us, which is the part I'm proudest of.

Four weeks without us

Since launch night, nobody at the Register has asked us to change anything on the website. That was the goal from the very first conversation, and it's the thing I was least sure we would manage.

In the four weeks after launch, the volunteers:

• Wrote 211 notes, almost all of them standing in front of the building, on their phones.

• Added 37 nicknames. The bus station now has six. "The Crinkle" was added by a bus driver, who wrote to Úna to say he'd been calling it that since 1979.

• Added 52 photographs from their own collections, with their own alt text, some of it better than mine, Marta reports.

• Marked two buildings as demolished, with the year, and kept their pages.

• Corrected one building's architect, after a letter from the architect's granddaughter.

None of these needed us. None needed Úna's approval either, though she reads everything, every morning, with a coffee, and says it's the best part of her day.

The plaques

About 2,900 plaque scans in October, most on the weekends, most on the quays. The bus station's plaque is scanned more than any other, about one in nine. People scan it, read Declan's note, walk out from under the roof and back in again from the quay side, the way Kavanagh meant.

Sixty more plaques have gone up since launch, the new kind, with only the register number in the code. The enamel sign maker in Kilkenny has asked whether we would like a discount on the next five hundred. We have passed the question to Úna.

What we'd change

If we started again, three things.

We'd ask what the address was for, in the first workshop. Launch night taught us that. It would have taken five minutes in May.

We'd photograph in winter too. Marta's flat June light was right for concrete, but the swimming pool's best moment is a winter afternoon, and three of the walks run until December now. She is going back in January.

We'd bring the volunteers in earlier. We met Sorcha in May, but most of the walk leaders only saw the website in August. They had good ideas we'd have used sooner, like listing what's inside a building that's open to the public, which is now the most-read section on Walk 7.

What comes next

The Register is adding its first events in December: night walks, along the quays and through the city centre, to see the buildings lit from inside. They have modelled the events themselves: a walk, a date, a meeting point, a list of buildings. Aoife looked over it and changed one field name. That's all.

As for us, we have started talking to a small maritime museum about an archive of ship plans, ten thousand drawings in a room with no windows. Elias is already excited about the title blocks. Leela has asked whether the room has signal.

The bus station's foundation stone is still where it was, next to the entrance, under the lowest fold of the roof. More people read it now.