A running log · since April 2026

What we've shipped.

Local calendars get sharper the longer they're around. Here's a running log of what's new — features, sources, fact-checks, and fixes.

June 2026 · Build-out sprint

Late June 2026

Working map view with marker clustering — lazy-loaded so it doesn't cost data on mountain cell.
Service worker — the calendar now reads offline. Persona research said spotty cell is real; this addresses it.
Hiking & Trails + Heritage & History field guides — seven guides total now.
"Tonight" surface on the homepage — events starting in the next six hours, pinned above the rest.
"Add to calendar" downloads — every per-event page now produces a valid .ics file.
RSS feed at /feed.xml.
Submit-an-event page at /submit/ — structured mailto, no backend, no form-spam.
Bing IndexNow wired into the cron — new pages get pinged on every scrape.
llms.txt + colophon page — for AI crawlers and curious humans respectively.

June 2026 · Fact-check pass

Mid-June 2026

Audited every venue address, festival date, mile-marker, and demographic claim against public sources. ~25 corrections landed.

Pickin' on the Square corrected to 6 PM (older copy said 7 PM).
Great Smoky Mountains Railroad depot moved to 45 Mitchell St (we had 226 Everett St — wrong).
Whitewater Falls corrected to "tallest east of the Rockies" (it's not tallest east of the Mississippi).
Bridal Veil Falls — corrected: you walk under it; vehicle access closed since 2003.
Macon County median household income updated to $59,061 (ACS 2024 5-year).
Drake Enterprises vs Drake Software disambiguated — Drake Enterprises is the holding co (~18 businesses); Drake Software is one subsidiary (~600 in Franklin).
Franklin Folk Festival removed from recurring fixtures — last instance was 2023.
Cherokee Ruby & Sapphire noted as the only fully unsalted Franklin mine — others offer both native and enriched buckets.

June 2026 · Almanac design system

Early June 2026

Complete visual redesign on the new "Almanac" system — warm paper, emerald, clay, gold, river, pine palette.
Three typefaces — Newsreader (display), Hanken Grotesk (body), Spline Sans Mono (metadata).
Drive-time bands in the sidebar — "Right here / A quick hop / Worth the drive / Make a day of it."
Family-marker chips — Free, Childcare, Kid-friendly, Dog-friendly — derived from event content.
Day-grouped feed with sticky day headers (replaces the previous grid).
Per-event static pages with Event JSON-LD — the SEO foundation.
Single source of truth CSS — homepage and all static pages link to the same 4 files (no more static.css clobber risk).

May–June 2026 · The MVP overhaul

Late May into June 2026

14 placeholder scrapers archived + 4 new real ones added (SMCPA, Mainspring, Cowee School, Franklin High School via Thrillshare).
Great Smoky Mountains Railroad scraper rewritten to parse the date out of the event title suffix — older version used the article publish date.
Deterministic validator pipeline — 5 pure functions catch the documented bad-data patterns (WP RSS footers, garbage venues, suspect publish-hash times, etc.) at $0 cost.
Per-source 30-event cap — Visit Haywood was producing 17% of the feed; not anymore.
Per-scraper 90-second timeout in run_all.py — one hanging scraper can't kill the whole run.
Freshness watchdog opens a GitHub issue when events.json is >36h stale.
"Tell me about an event" CLI — scrapers/add_event.py writes to user_events.json + git-commits.

"Local calendars get sharper the longer they're around — every wrong address, every old event date, every miscategorized concert is a chance to get it right next time."

The full technical handoff log lives in the repo at HANDOFF.md. For the source code: github.com/Manu-Team/franklin-website. For the philosophy behind the choices: the colophon.