localpreservation / placematters

:statue_of_liberty: Place Matters Toolkit: An open educational resource based on a toolkit by the Place Matters program in New York City.

Place Matters Toolkit

The Place Matters Toolkit is a guidebook to help you identify, promote, and protect places that you care about. The toolkit was originally created and published by the Place Matters program of City Lore in New York City. In June 2016, Baltimore Heritage started working with Place Matters staff and preservation advocates to revise and expand the toolkit to create a new open educational resource for the Local Preservaton School.

What is the Local Preservation School?

The Local Preservation School is an open learning environment where preservation advocates and volunteers share with people how to save and sustain historic places in their communities. Our goal is to teach you how to get involved with historic preservation in your community through free online courses, easy-to-use tutorials and fun projects. Beginners are welcome!

Learn more about the Local Preservation School 👉

How can you contribute?

If any of the following is true, we encourage you to contribute to the Local Preservation School project:

• You have expertise in historic preservation, cultural heritage, public history, or related topics
• You want share your knowledge as part of a collaborative open source community

You can contribute to this toolkit/course, our main project website, our handbook, or our resource repository.

Read our Contribution Guidelines 👉

Licensing

The Place Matters Toolkit is published by the Local Preservation School with permission from the Marci Reaven and City Lore under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This site is published using the Minimal Mistakes Jekyll theme which is available under an MIT License.

Project Team

This project is led by Eli Pousson, Director of Preservation & Outreach for Baltimore Heritage. The original Place Matters Toolkit was written by Marci Reaven and edited by Emily Gertz. If you are interested in getting involved, please get in touch with Eli by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @elipousson.

Project Funding

The Local Preservation School project is supported by funding from the National Park Service/National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers. The original development of the Place Matters Toolkit was supported by the the J.M. Kaplan Fund and the New York Community Trust.

placematters's Issues

Site Launch Checklist

from the DataMade Site Launch Checklist

Framing / Call to Action

• Make sure that the site has a clear call to action. This should not be 'hey look at this cool tool'. Rather, it should be a way for someone to engage in a meaningful way on the issue being presented.

Some examples:

• Join a mailing list (which means you need to create one)
• Attend an event
• Share on Facebook/Twitter
• Donate to a particular organization
• Create a Tumblr for people to share interesting findings (if it's a data access site)

Web Search Indexing

• If you have a staging site, tell the search engine robots not to index you with a robots.txt
• Make sure you allow indexing when you are ready to launch
• Make sure you handle the www subdomain with DNS redirect

Google Analytics

• Create Google Analytics account
• Hook up the GA Tracking Code (typically in our analytics_lib.js file)
• Set up relevant Goals and Funnels
• Set up Google Webmaster Tools
• Verify site in Webmaster Tools with DNS TXT record
• Link Webmaster Tools to Google Analytics

Sharing & Rich Snippets

• Set up general meta tags

• <meta name=“description”>
• <meta name=“author”>

• Set up Facebook meta tags & validate here

• <meta property=“og:site_name”>
• <meta property=“og:title”>
• <meta property=“og:type”>
• <meta property=“og:description”>
• <meta property=“og:url”>
• <meta property=“og:image”>

• Set up Twitter meta tags & validate here

• <meta name=“twitter:card”>
• <meta name=“twitter:site”>
• <meta name=“twitter:creator”>
• <meta name=“twitter:description”> (note that this needs to be under 200 characters)
• <meta name=“twitter:title”>
• <meta name=“twitter:url”>
• <meta name=“twitter:image:src”>

• Create 2-5 meme images using Canva or a similar tool

Mobile Friendliness

Test on various mobile devices:

• scrolling is easy
• nav bar works
• hoverable things are tappable
• charts/maps look ok

Page Speed

• run the site through https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Miscellaneous Polish

• add favicons, apple touch icons (http://www.favicomatic.com/)
• add 404 & 500 error pages

Load Testing

If your site relies on a database or server-side code, it should use caching and be load tested. If it's a static HTML or Jekyll site, you can skip this section.

• set up page caching
• write a script to load test all your pages. Here's a good example from Illinois Sunshine

Testing

• Plan for a day of bugfixing. This day should happen after you have added the last features you plan on adding.

GitHub Readme

If the site is open source, make sure the Readme.md is complete and accurate.

Here's a few good examples:

• Geomancer
• Illinois Sunshine

The Readme should have the following sections:

• Overview
• Setup
• Running locally
• Team
• Errors / Bugs
• Pull Requests
• Copyright and License

Outreach

• Write up press release
• Identify who will be the primary person of contact and make their info prominent on the website and all PR
• Identify relevant media contacts to email
• Identify relevant social news sites (reddit, listservs, slack channels)
• Divide & conquer - send out the media blitz!