Created by
salem.community was created by Aria Stewart. Thank you for large contributions from Dar Craft.
The origin
When I moved here, and again after the city got its new website, I noticed just how fragmented information about Salem is. There are so many sites, so out of date, and overlapping in purpose and intent that knowing what's going on and even what's available to do and see is remarkably hard.
It started when I noticed that Cisco's Tipico (then Salem Tipico) and El Buen Sabor (then La Delicia) were not listed in a search for restaurants on Google Maps. It's hard to show all the restaurants downtown at once, there are so many, but in The Point? There's plenty of room on the map, and Google just didn't bother. I asked myself what else was missing, and spent some time finding out. There are more than 150 restaurants in Salem, and I bet even if you've lived here your whole life there are a few on the list you've never heard of, and many that you'll find yourself surprised to have forgotten.
— Aria
Acknowledgments
SvelteKit
This site is built with Svelte and SvelteKit by the Svelte team.
OpenStreetMap
The maps and venue data across the site come from OpenStreetMap and its editors and contributors. OpenStreetMap is a free, collaborative map of the world, built by a community of volunteers who survey and maintain geographic data around the globe. We use the OpenStreetMap data to place the venues, restaurants, and other locations you see here, loaded through the Overpass API. This site acknowledges the thousands of mappers whose patient, ongoing work makes accurate local data possible, and it is released under the Open Database License.
If you see errors in the location data on this site and want to fix it yourself, learning to edit OpenStreetMap is worth doing. Feel free to contact Aria if you want help getting started.
How the technologies are used
- Svelte & SvelteKit — the component
framework and application shell. Svelte renders each page's
UI; SvelteKit provides routing, server-side rendering for event, venue, and
category pages, and a handful of prerendered static content
pages like this one. It is deployed using
@sveltejs/adapter-node. - Deployments are managed
with a tool called
git-create-deploy-branchto a server currently hosted at Hetzner in Germany. - OpenStreetMap data — the source of the venue, restaurant, and bicycle-parking locations. Data is fetched at build time via the Overpass API and cached, then rendered onto maps using Leaflet.
- Event sources — event listings are gathered from the venues' and organizations' own websites and calendars, normalized through a data pipeline, and published here for the Salem community.
- Artificial Intelligence models used in this pipeline are privacy-consciously hosted by Umans, based in Paris, France, using models from DeepSeek and Alibaba. The 0731 snapshot of DeepSeek V4 Flash, and prior to that, Z.ai's GLM-5.2 and Moonshot's Kimi K2.7-Code was used for significant portions of the development work, allowing us to focus on the community and presentation aspects.