~5 min read

Release notes

A grouped view of what landed in each release of marbleheaddata.org. The current site version appears in the footer.

Three different histories are kept, each with a different purpose:

Release notes (this page) – site versions, grouped by theme. Best place to skim "what's new since I last looked."
Data changelog – primary-source events: meetings, rating actions, state certifications. Records what data changed and why, with before/after values.
Git commit history – every change, in order, with diffs. Authoritative.

Versioning follows SemVer loosely: major for site-wide reorganizations, minor for new pages or substantial features, patch for fixes and copy.

v1.3.0 – April 26, 2026

Plain-language pass on the homepage, three new pages, and local Jekyll dev wired up.

New pages

After the no-vote: did Marblehead find the money the last time an override failed? (#678)
Prop 2½ history storybook page (#681)
Level-funding mechanism analysis and retrospective (#658)

Plain-language pass on homepage questions (complete)

All 15 homepage answer sections rewritten across seven PRs. The "alternatives" section (#667) is the register reference for the rest.

Single-question rewrites: alternatives (#667), schools (#669), levy (#672), again (#675), moneygone (#676)
Moderate-touch batch: override, servicelevel, voteno, trash, library, trust (#687)
Light-touch batch: taxrank, mycost, size, seniors (#690)

Data & analysis

FY23 FTE jump resolved: ruled out new hires, narrowed the unknown (#694)
FY26 share-of-spending breakdown added to "where has the money gone" (#663)
Squeeze-mechanism finding reconciled across five pages (#664)
Scenario vs. tier comparison + clean tier highlighting (#671)
Gap-chart case studies preview (#628)
125 documents scraped from marbleheadschools.org: CBAs, FY27 budget, superintendent contract (#680)
"How are positions actually funded?" section added to inside-school-staffing (#697)

UX & navigation

Votes-strip: countdown badges restored (#684); Town Meeting line gained time and location (#685) and a Google Maps link (#691); description paragraphs stripped (#689); footer note centered (#693); street address dropped (#692); parallel where-line for Election Day (#686)
"Pick your first answer" made clickable, scrolls to featured (#673)
Featured-question width matched to in-question width (#670)
Tax-bill toggle inlined into readout, stale hints updated (#668)
Town Explorer: filters collapsed by default (#683)
Deficit model: simple-mode disclosure (#660)

Infrastructure

Local Jekyll dev + Playwright smoke against localhost (#682)
Local dev flow documented in CLAUDE.md (#688)

Copy

"forty-five years on" → "forty-five years later" (#695)

v1.2.0 – April 24, 2026

Statewide override comparables. Marblehead's three tiers placed in MA-wide context.

Statewide override history chart: 4,640 ballot questions across 305 MA municipalities, FY1990–FY2027, with per-question and per-election medians (#649, #650)
Override landscape page: every $6M+ override ever attempted in MA (55 of them); Marblehead's three tiers inserted at their positions among comparables
Town Explorer additions: density and levy-per-sq-mi columns (#648); sticky thead and "Show all 351" button (#651)
Question pages polish: key-stats blocks, chart links, read-next (#635)
Meeting video index, AI summarizer, homepage section (#636)
Lint CI: first workflow with three Tier 1 guardrails (#600), then Tier 2 content guardrails (#605)
Deficit model: scenario-set refresh (#601); "Show me how this works" guided tour (#579)
April 15 Select Board override deck ingested; calculator updated to phase-in schedule (#582, #589, #593)
Minutes catalog Phase 2: 331-row catalog and extraction pipeline (#614, #615)
DLS Schedule A scraper + peer deficit curves chart (#594)
Case law note: Emerson v. Boston on fee-vs-tax durability for Q2 trash (#590, #611, #618)
Style cleanup pass: meta-narration stripped, content guardrails enforced (#621, #629)

v1.1.0 – April 16, 2026

Major frontend refactor, CI, PR previews, and the verification network.

Extract 1,894 lines of explore JS and 1,702 lines of explore CSS from index.html into separate assets (#534, #544)
Extract landing, question nav, and notes panel into Jekyll includes (#545)
Cloudflare Pages PR previews (#552)
CI: Jekyll build + smoke tests against localhost (#532, #540)
Override vote history chart (#531)
Town Explorer: debt exclusions, three-way vote toggle, override pass-rate column
Deficit model: absorption slider, hover tooltips, scenario stories (#536)
Browse-first flow: read evidence before committing a pick (#522)
Verify dashboard redesign with branch hero, network list, invite CTA (#511); discoverable-credential passkey sign-in (#518)
Neighbor verification network with passkey auth (initial drop)

v1.0 – April 12, 2026

First version-tagged release. Site reached its current shape after the Jekyll layouts refactor and community-pulse polish; the footer version marker was added in the same window. Pre-v1.0 history is in the git log.