mirror of
https://expo.survex.com/repositories/expoweb/.git/
synced 2024-12-22 16:32:22 +00:00
184 lines
9.7 KiB
HTML
184 lines
9.7 KiB
HTML
<html>
|
|
<head>
|
|
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf8" />
|
|
<title>CUCC Website Genesis</title>
|
|
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href=/css/main2.css />
|
|
</head>
|
|
<body>
|
|
<h2 id="tophead">CUCC Expedition Handbook - Expo Website Genesis</h2>
|
|
<h1>Taking Expo Bullshit into the 21st Century</h1>
|
|
|
|
<p align="center"><em>Cambridge Underground 1996, pp 61-62</em></p>
|
|
|
|
<p><b><i>by AERW</i></b></center>
|
|
|
|
|
|
<p>[This article was published in CU 1996, shortly after the site was put
|
|
on the web. The text is reproduced without change, but the URLs were
|
|
updated (in 2006) to reflect the then location of these pages.]
|
|
|
|
|
|
<p>For many years, the only documentation of CUCC's activities in Austria
|
|
comprised the Log Books written "in the field" and an article or two in the
|
|
annual "Cambridge Underground". A few write ups appeared in "BCRA Caves and
|
|
Caving" or "Descent", and occasionally a lecture would occur at the BCRA
|
|
Conference. The standard of underground surveying was poor and, for the most
|
|
part, surface surveying was non-existant. Often the only way to find some of
|
|
the earlier cave discoveries was to collar the people who found them and get
|
|
them to show you. Regrettably, even this didn't always work. Looking for
|
|
going leads often involved grovelling on the floor of the Potato Hut to
|
|
find an old logbook in a tatty cardboard box, then wading through it to
|
|
find the relevant write up and trying to make some sense of it. All this
|
|
before even going underground !
|
|
|
|
<p>Today, we exchange survey data with other groups working in the area, and
|
|
all of CUCC's internal and published documentation is available in a few
|
|
minutes anywhere in the world. Logbook write-ups are linked to cave
|
|
descriptions, maps, and even colour photos, and "every" going lead or
|
|
prospect is cross-referenced to the cave description. What on earth
|
|
happened to bring this all about ?
|
|
|
|
<p>Two things - technology, and Kaninchenhöhle. The technology made it
|
|
all possible, and Kaninchenhöhle provided the stimulus to do it.
|
|
|
|
<p>To explain: for many years, Andy had been quietly sticking all of CUCC's
|
|
cave descriptions, together with what translations of Austrian ones I could
|
|
get/make, into a catalogue of caves which was supposed to be useful in
|
|
Austria to prevent duplication of effort, and to avoid losing caves
|
|
completely. A printed version occupied a very hefty ring-binder and was not
|
|
found tremendously useful, particularly as maps were somewhat lacking. Trying
|
|
to get the information to keep it any less than about five years out of date
|
|
was also a losing battle. Some of the cave descriptions are inevitably quite
|
|
complex, and Kaninchenhöhle, in particular, has so many side leads and
|
|
connections between main routes that the description was becoming impossible
|
|
to understand.
|
|
|
|
<p>It is a feature of complex cave descriptions that the main route becomes
|
|
hard to follow as more and more side passages get into the description.
|
|
If the side passages are instead described somewhere else, then it is equally
|
|
difficult to follow the route to the going leads at their ends. There doesn't
|
|
seem to be an effective solution to this in a printed guidebook, but by
|
|
writing the description in hyper-text, the side passage descriptions can
|
|
be removed from the main route without making them inaccessible. At each
|
|
junction, the passage is merely noted, and the main description continues.
|
|
But the note includes a LINK which can instead be followed to read the
|
|
full description of the side passage.
|
|
|
|
<p>This approach was adopted for the KH description and proved rather
|
|
successful. However, the resulting description lacked context, and soon links
|
|
appeared to various other text files, which in turn were turned into
|
|
hypertext. The process gradually took off, until by last year's (1995)
|
|
expedition, all the cave descriptions were in this form, with additional
|
|
material to describe each area on the surface and the approaches to use to
|
|
get there. There were also a few photographs in the archive, though hardly
|
|
enough to be useful.
|
|
|
|
<p>A few journal articles and some of the older logbooks were also on disc,
|
|
and it immediately became obvious that the value of these could be
|
|
enhanced by adding links to the other material. Hence a cave description
|
|
could have a link to the trip which discovered it; trips could be linked
|
|
to the previous and subsequent trips to the same place (not necessarily
|
|
in the same logbook) and journal articles could likewise be linked to
|
|
the relevant cave description.
|
|
|
|
<p>As the process took off, the gaps became more obvious, so progressively
|
|
more logbooks have been transcribed and journal articles either retrieved
|
|
from mouldering floppies or typed in afresh. Some early (and painful)
|
|
attempts to represent logbook sketches in ascii text have been superceded
|
|
by scanned-in material and the archive continued to build.
|
|
|
|
<p>All of this represented a considerable amount of work, and the danger with
|
|
such things is always that it will get lost, neglected or fall into disuse.
|
|
However, stuff on disc can always be distributed to many people, in the
|
|
hope that even if disaster befalls one copy of the archive, someone else
|
|
will have an intact copy. In this way, hundreds of kilobytes of updated
|
|
descriptions were soon passing backwards and forwards by email between
|
|
Andy and Wookey each week. But the material was still only available to
|
|
a tiny handful of people.
|
|
|
|
<p>The format in which all this work had been carried out was, from the very
|
|
start, the very same format which was needed to make it widely available
|
|
on the Internet in the form of World-Wide-Web pages. Soon, Wookey managed
|
|
to find us a server which would put it all up for global access. This
|
|
revealed a very large number of problems with the system, but a couple
|
|
of weeks work fixed most of these. A Cambridge University Caving Club
|
|
home page was created, and the expedition archive (by now around five
|
|
hundred separate files) hung below this. The CUCC pages are still a bit
|
|
limited (the Home page, a brief description of the club and one of exCS,
|
|
and an (old) version of the Novice's Guide to CUCC). However, it is
|
|
hoped that CUCC itself will provide up-to-the-minute pages covering current
|
|
club activities and perhaps even a weekly copy of the club newsletter ?
|
|
|
|
<p>It is hoped that by the time you are reading this, all the extant logbooks
|
|
and all the Cambridge Underground articles will be on the server, together
|
|
with fully up-to-date descriptions of all CUCC's caves that we still have
|
|
info for. The "Expedition slide set" which has been in gestation for over
|
|
five years might even come together this year, in which case a Photo-CD
|
|
can be made and a lot of much more useful pictures added to the archive.
|
|
This is by no means the end of the road however. There are still many
|
|
surveys and logbook sketches to scan, and we have a clickable map of the
|
|
surface to take you straight to the cave descriptions (but unfortunately
|
|
the server does not yet support this). There is foreign material from other
|
|
groups in the area to add, and we have links to another web site being run
|
|
by one of the German groups working in the area. The format allows for
|
|
things like video clips and sound, as well as text and photos so we have
|
|
the tantalising prospect of bringing a load of drunken students singing
|
|
"Wild Caver" to your computer screen...
|
|
|
|
<p>However, like the caves themselves, the web site is not easy to describe
|
|
in printed text. We hope you'll try it for yourself, get enthused about expo,
|
|
and want to come along and contribute. We hope it's structured so that you
|
|
can find your way about fairly easily - if you have problems, please let us
|
|
know so that we can fix it during the ongoing process of development. To ease
|
|
your way, here are a few selected entry points. Note that the names are
|
|
case-sensitive, and that the initial "cucc" is lower case.
|
|
|
|
<p>[<em>All those links are now incorrect and don't work. They have been commented-out. Press ctrl-U if you want to see them.</em>]
|
|
<!--
|
|
<dl>
|
|
<dt>CUCC Home page
|
|
<dd><a href="index.htm">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/</a>
|
|
<dt>Expo Home page
|
|
<dd><a href="expo/">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/index.htm</a>
|
|
<dt>Colour pictures
|
|
<dd><a href="expo/gallery/0.htm">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/gallery/0.htm</a>
|
|
<dt>Kaninchenhöhle
|
|
<dd><a href="expo/smkridge/161/161.html">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/smkridge/161/161.html</a>
|
|
<dt>New entrance
|
|
<dd><a href="expo/smkridge/161/sftotp.htm">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/smkridge/161/sftotp.htm</a>
|
|
<dt>Stellerweg etc.
|
|
<dd><a href="expo/smkridge/41/41.htm">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/smkridge/41/41.htm</a>
|
|
<dt>LogBooks
|
|
<dd>http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/years/<year>/log.htm
|
|
where <year> is 1976, 1977, ... 1995
|
|
<dt>Index of articles
|
|
<dd><a href="expo/pubs.htm">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/pubs.htm</a>
|
|
<dt>Index of caves
|
|
<dd><a href="expo/indxal.htm">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/indxal.htm</a>
|
|
<dt>Recent changes
|
|
<dd><a href="expo/update.htm">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/update.htm</a>
|
|
</dl>
|
|
-->
|
|
<p>If there's anything you think is wrong, anything you think is missing, or
|
|
anything you have to offer to add, please get in touch at
|
|
|
|
<p>Andy Waddington (mailbox 'Austria' on site 'pennine.demon.co.uk')<br>
|
|
Wookey (mailbox 'Wookey' on site 'aleph1.co.uk')
|
|
|
|
<p>and finally, the entire web edifice will be out in Austria [in 1997] on one or more
|
|
machines in the Potato hut for expo members to browse through (and add to)
|
|
to answer all your questions about the caves of the Loser Plateau ! If
|
|
enough interest is shown, and enough photographs digitised, the current
|
|
"state-of-the-art" may be put onto CD-ROM. The site has outgrown floppies,
|
|
but can still be fitted onto a ZIP disc so, for the time being, if you
|
|
haven't got Internet connectivity, the edifice can be supplied on disc.
|
|
|
|
<p>Andy Waddington
|
|
|
|
<p><hr>
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
</body>
|
|
</html>
|