These pages are for cavers wanting to:
The primary and recommended way of editing this handbook, historic expo files and survey data is to use a laptop which has the version control software installed and configured. The person editing needs to know how to use this software, and also needs to know how to edit raw HTML files using a text editor.
The Expo laptop has the necessary software installed, so it is best to learn how to do this when sitting at that laptop.
It's important to understand that the pages you can edit by this method are stored in a version control system (see below). This stops us losing data and makes it very hard for you to screw anything up permanently, so don't worry about making changes - they can always be reverted if there is a problem. It also means that several people can work on the site on different computers at once and normally merge their changes easily.
The recommended editing workflow is to (a) use the version control software to synchronise your local laptop copy of the website files with that on the server ("pull" from the server); (b) edit a set of .html files on your laptop so that all links between them are consistent, (c) save the files locally, and (d) "commit" them locally; (e) "push" the collection of changes to the expo server.
See the repositories page.
All the scans, photos, presentations, fat documents and videos are not stored in the version control repositories so you cannot edit or change them using the method described here.
Setting up your own laptop so that it can do everything the expo laptop can do is quite a complicated process. At a minimum you will be an experienced software nerd already and will have git and a text editor installed and you will know how to use them. You will have done the ssh key-pair setup process - which you can only do entirely on your own if you have access to the expo laptop.
See setting up a minimal laptop for a short list of software. This assumes you know how to use it all.
See setting up your own laptop for the full list of software we use and where to get it.
Note that the instructions are primarily for people using Linux with some help for those using Windows. If you are a Mac user then you are on your own.
If you know what you are doing here is the basic info on what's where:
Simple changes to static HTML files will take effect immediately but changes to dynamically-generated files - cave descriptions, QM lists etc. - will not take effect, until the troggle import/update scripts are run on the server. These should run automatically and frequently but currently they are run manually by nerds as the expo server is undergoing heavy software maintenance.
Back to to "Edit this page"
Forwards to Data Management Manual