College in Florence 🏛️

Live site: https://torwager.github.io/collegeinflorence/

An interactive student map of Florence, Italy with three curated layers:

• 🎓 Colleges — every college and university based in Florence, including foreign campuses (NYU, Syracuse, Kent State, FSU, …), with programs, student numbers, demographics, and links.
• ☕ Study Spots — laptop-friendly cafés, libraries, and coworking spaces where you can park with a cappuccino, curated from Reddit, reviews, and student blogs with a synthesized 1–10 recommendation score.
• 🍷 Eat & Nightlife — the best budget-friendly aperitivo bars, street food, pubs, and clubs for students, same curation approach.

Plus a verified student chat: one room per school and a "Piazza" room for everyone, gated by school-email verification (you register with a recognized school domain and click an emailed sign-in link).

Stack

Pure static site (GitHub Pages) — vanilla JS, Leaflet + CARTO tiles, no build step. Layer data lives in data/*.json. Chat and email verification run on Firebase's free tier (Auth email-link sign-in + Cloud Firestore), since GitHub Pages can't run a backend.

Activating the chat (one-time setup, ~10 min)

The site works fully without this; the chat pages show "launching soon" until configured.

1. Create a project at console.firebase.google.com (free Spark plan is fine).

2. Project settings → Your apps → Add web app, copy the config object into js/firebase-config.js (replacing null).

3. Authentication → Sign-in method → enable Email link (passwordless sign-in) under Email/Password.

4. Authentication → Settings → Authorized domains → add torwager.github.io.

5. Firestore Database → Create database (production mode), then paste the contents of firestore.rules into Rules and publish.

6. Create the server-side domain allowlist — in Firestore, add collection config, document allowlist, with an array field domains. Generate the list from the map data:

   python3 -c "import json; d=json.load(open('data/colleges.json')); print(sorted({x.lower() for p in d['places'] for x in p.get('emailDomains', [])} | {x.lower() for x in d.get('extraDomains', [])}))"

   (extraDomains in data/colleges.json holds recognized domains that aren't tied to a Florence college — currently dartmouth.edu.)

7. Commit + push js/firebase-config.js. (The Firebase web config is safe to publish; access is enforced by the Firestore rules and email verification.)

Data & curation

Recommendation scores in the study-spot and nightlife layers are synthesized from public review sentiment (Google reviews commentary, Reddit r/florence, student and travel blogs) — each entry keeps its source quotes and links. Lists are deliberately curated: roughly the top 15% of what's out there, not a directory. To update, edit the JSON in data/ — the site picks it up on the next deploy.

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