A guide for updating popecol.org
There are two ways to change popecol.org. Most of you will only ever need the first one, and with either, any mistake can be undone.
Just 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, everyday 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 an admin 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, ORCID, ResearchGate or Bluesky links if you have them: they appear as small icons under your name. |
| 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. |
How to write news, and which photos to use
Write news as the group (“we”), informally and for anyone. Think of it as a chance to show off your work to your grandma.
Use your own photos, one from someone who is happy for us to use it, or one with a Creative Commons licence, and say who took it. For a Creative Commons photo, the credit is short: the photographer’s name linked to the photo’s page, and the licence (“CC BY” or “CC BY-SA”) linked to the licence, as in the example further down.
Or do it yourself on GitHub
This is for those of you 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.
Get access
- Create an account at github.com if you don’t have one, and send Arpat your username.
- Arpat adds you, and GitHub emails you an invitation. Click Accept invitation within seven days.
You’ll then find the website files at github.com/arpatoz/popecol-org. Bookmark it.
Change a file in four steps
- Open the file: click through the folders. Every page is a folder with a file
index.qmdinside. - Click the pencil at the top right.
- Make your change. Leave the block between the two
---lines at the top in place: it holds the page’s title and settings. - Click “Commit changes…”, write a few words about what you did, and click Commit changes again.
The text uses a few simple 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 |
Add a new member
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 fill in 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
:::The group is one of Lead, Researchers, Staff, PhD students, MSc students. Write only the name part of the email, never the full address. No photo yet? Just 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-magninWhen someone’s role changes, change it in both places: subtitle on their 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.
Write 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 …**
, [CC BY](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/))](/media/2026/11/photo-name.jpg)
The rest of the post.If the news is not about a paper, leave out the paper: line. To show the post in the home-page highlights too, copy an entry in data/highlights.yml.
Every post gets a “← News” link above its title and a “More news” row at the end with the three newest other posts, all by itself. Their photos come from image:, so give every post one.
Add 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).
Add a paper or thesis
Add it at the very top of data/publications.yml or data/theses.yml by copying the entry below the explanation lines. The two spaces at the start of each line matter. Group members go between double stars (**Ozgul A**), and a paper without a DOI yet gets link: ~.
Check that it worked, or undo it
The Actions tab on GitHub shows the website being rebuilt: a yellow dot while it runs, a green tick when your change is online, a red cross if it stopped. Don’t worry about a red cross: the website simply stays as it was. The cause is almost always a small 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 just ask in #website.
What not to touch
Please leave these 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. For design changes, ask Arpat.
A few habits help: make one change at a time, and copy an existing example. 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. When in doubt, ask in #website or ask Arpat.
Who visits the site
You can see how many people visit the site, which pages they read and where they come from at popecol.goatcounter.com. It’s open to everyone, uses no cookies and collects no personal data.