A guide for updating popecol.org

How to get something changed on popecol.org: ask in the #website channel on Slack, or edit it yourself on GitHub.
Modified

October 18, 2026

There are two ways to change popecol.org. Most people only ever need the first one.

The easy way: ask in #website

Post what you want in the #website channel on Slack and mention @Claude. Attach any photo or file. Claude checks the channel every hour, prepares the change and replies in your thread with what it did.

Small, ordinary changes (your own page, a paper or thesis, a news post, a typo) go online by themselves. Anything else, such as a change to someone else’s page, waits until Arpat or Daniela approves it with a 👍 in Slack.

What to send

To… Send
Get your own page Your name, role (e.g. MSc Student) and start year, your office, a few sentences about you and your project, and a photo of yourself. Add your Google Scholar or ORCID link if you have one.
Update your page The new text, or what to change. A new photo as an attachment.
Post news about a new paper The DOI and a photo. Add a few sentences in your own words if you like; otherwise Claude drafts the post from the paper.
Post other news (fieldwork, an award, an event) What happened, when and who, and a photo.
Add a paper or thesis The DOI, or the PDF for a thesis.
Fix a mistake The page and what is wrong.

Tone and photos

Write news in the group’s voice (“we”), informally and for anyone: a chance to show off your work to your grandma.

For photos, use your own, one from someone who is happy for us to use it, or one with a Creative Commons licence, and say who took it.

Doing it yourself on GitHub

For those who want to get more involved. The website is a folder of text files on GitHub; you edit a file in the browser, and about five minutes later the change is online. GitHub keeps every earlier version, so nothing can be lost.

Getting access

  1. Create an account at github.com if you don’t have one, and send Arpat your username.
  2. Arpat adds you, and GitHub emails you an invitation. Click Accept invitation within seven days.

The website files are then at github.com/arpatoz/popecol-org. Bookmark it.

Every change is four steps

  1. Open the file: click through the folders. Every page is a folder with a file index.qmd inside.
  2. Click the pencil at the top right.
  3. Make your change. Leave the block between the two --- lines at the top in place: it holds the page’s title and settings.
  4. Click “Commit changes…”, write a few words about what you did, and click Commit changes again.

The text uses a few signs: **bold**, *italic*, ## A heading, - a bullet point, [link text](https://example.org), and a blank line for a new paragraph.

Which file to open

To change… Open…
A member’s page the folder with their name, e.g. selin-ersoy/index.qmd
A member’s role or years their page, and also data/people.yml
Publications data/publications.yml
Theses data/theses.yml
Courses on the Teaching page data/courses.yml
A news post news/, then the post’s folder
The sliding highlights on the home page data/highlights.yml
A research project research/, then the project’s folder
About, Join us about/index.qmd, join-us/index.qmd
A short link such as popecol.org/zoom data/redirects.txt
These documents docs/, then the document’s folder

A new member page

Click Add file, then Create new file, and type firstname-lastname/index.qmd as the name (typing the slash creates the folder). Paste this and replace the details:

---
title: Jeanne Magnin
subtitle: MSc Student
group: MSc students
image: ../media/2026/10/jeanne-magnin.jpg
---

A few sentences about you and your project.

## CV

- Since 2025, MSc Student in Biodiversity, University of Zurich

::: {.contact}
**Office** Y19-M-88  
**Email (@uzh.ch)** firstname.lastname
:::
  • group is one of Lead, Researchers, Staff, PhD students, MSc students.
  • The email is the name part only, never the full address.
  • No photo yet? Leave out the image: line.

Then add the person to data/people.yml, in surname order:

- name: Jeanne Magnin
  start: 2026
  end: ~
  roles:
    - {role: MSc Student}
  page: jeanne-magnin

When a role changes, change it in both places: subtitle on the page and roles in data/people.yml. When someone leaves, set end: to the year and page: ~ in data/people.yml, and ask in #website for their page to be moved to the former members.

A news post

Create news/a-short-title/index.qmd and paste this:

---
title: The headline of the post, in sentence case
date: 2026-11-03
author: Firstname Lastname
image: https://popecol.org/media/2026/11/photo-name.jpg
description: "One sentence for the News list."
paper: https://doi.org/10.xxxx/xxxxx
---

**In our new paper in [Journal Name](https://doi.org/10.xxxx/xxxxx), led by our PhD student [Firstname Lastname](/firstname-lastname/), we show …**

![What the photo shows (photo: Name, [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/))](/media/2026/11/photo-name.jpg)

The rest of the post.

Leave out the paper: line for news that is not about a paper. To show the post in the home-page highlights too, copy an entry in data/highlights.yml.

A photo

Make it about 1600 pixels wide (on a Mac: Preview, Tools, Adjust Size) and give it a simple name without spaces. In the media folder, open the year and then the month (media/2026/10/), click Add file, then Upload files. Its address is then /media/2026/10/name.jpg (../media/… on member pages).

A paper or thesis

Add it at the very top of data/publications.yml or data/theses.yml, copying the entry below the explanation lines. Two spaces at the start of each line matter. Group members go between double stars (**Ozgul A**); a paper without a DOI yet gets link: ~.

Checking and undoing

The Actions tab on GitHub shows the rebuild: a yellow dot while it runs, a green tick when the change is online, a red cross if it stopped. A red cross leaves the website as it was; the cause is almost always a slip in the top block of the file you edited (a missing ---, colon or indentation, or a title with a colon that is not in quotation marks).

To undo a change, open the file, click History, open the version from before your change, copy its text back and commit. Or ask in #website.

What to leave alone

_quarto.yml (menu and settings), custom.scss (colours and layout), the files starting with an underscore, the .github and scripts folders, and the home page index.qmd in the top folder. Design changes go to Arpat.

Make one change at a time, copy an existing example, and when a fact appears in more than one file (a member’s role, for instance), search for the old words (press / on the GitHub page) and change them everywhere.