CUCC Expedition Handbook

Troggle - the beginnings of a manual

Troggle runs much of the the cave survey data management, presents the data on the website and manages the Expo Handbook.

Rewrite from here on...

This troggle manual describes these:

• Annual tasks: preparing for next year, finishing last year (troggle & scripts)
• Architectural documentation of how it all fits together & list of active scripts
• How to edit and maintain troggle itself. The code is public on repository :troggle:

This page is mostly an index to other records of what troggle is and what plans have been made - but never implemented - to improve it. Today troggle is used for only three things:

1. Reformatting all the visible webpages such that they have a coherent style and have a contents list at the top-left hand corner. This is particularly true of the handbook you are reading now and the historic records of past expeditions.
2. Publishing the "guidebook descriptions" of caves. The user who is creating a new guidebook description can do this by filling-in some online forms. (And managing all the cave suvey data to produce this.)
3. Providing a secondary way of editing individual pages of the handbook and historic records pages for very quick and urgent changes. This is the "Edit this page" capability; see for how to use it and how to tidy up afterwards.

[Note that /survey_scans/ is generated by troggle and is not the same thing as /expofiles/surveyscans/ at all.]

Only a small part of troggle's original plan was fully implemented and deployed. Many of the things it was intended to replace are still operating as a motley collection written by many different people in several languages (but mostly perl and python; we won't talk about the person who likes to use OCamL). Today troggle is used for only three things:

1. Reformatting all the visible webpages such that they have a coherent style and have a contents list at the top-left hand corner. This is particularly true of the handbook you are reading now and the historic records of past expeditions.
2. Publishing the "guidebook descriptions" of caves. The user who is creating a new guidebook description can do this by filling-in some online forms.

Troggle Login

Yes you can log in to the troggle control panel: expo.survex.com/troggle.

Archived updates

Since 2008 we have been keeping detailed records of all data management system updates in the version control system. Before then we manually maintained a list of updates which are now only of historical interest.

A history of the expo website and software was published in Cambridge Underground 1996. A copy of this article Taking Expo Bullshit into the 21st Century is archived here.