The GSL site is designed to make maintenance convenient and risk-free. We manage the site using standard development tools from the software industry, which have been carefully designed and widely tested. While it does require a little study and preparation to begin editing work, once learned, the system is exceptionally straightforward and reliable.

Please refer to the individual chapters listed to the right for illustrated guides on individual operations. Some specialized vocabulary is needed to explain the system. The main terms and concepts are explained here for convenience and clarity:

Metadata

Metadata is extra information about a document that is attached to it in some way, outside of its content. For text documents on our website, metadata includes the document title, the document nickname, and a flag showing whether the document should be shown with a table of contents. This information is written at the very top of all *.txt documents in the Text archive.

Markdown

Markdown is a simple plain text markup language that is used in all of the content files. The syntax is very simple, and a Japanese manual is available. The version of Markdown used on our system has a few extra features, which are explained in a separate manual.

Repository

See the entry for Subversion.

Rollout

A site rollout is the final step in publishing the website, when the changes committed to the Subversion repository from working copies are exported as pages on the gsl-nagoya-u.net webserver.

Server

In this guide, “the server” refers to the remote machine where our real site is stored. The server offers two services: Subversion and Apache. Subversion is a versioning database that keeps a record of all of our content. Apache is a webserver the serves the finished website to the Internet.

Subversion

The core of the maintenance system is the “Subversion repository”, or simply “the respository” for short. Subversion is a database that preserves a record of all changes made to the website contents and software, with a note of who made each change. The repository cannot be edited directly; all editing is done on a Working copy (also known as a Checkout) of the website contents, and changes are added to the repository with with a Commit command. Under Windows, the software used to do Subversion checkouts and commits is Turtle SVN. Subversion is free software. The complete manual is available online, both in English and in Japanese.

Text archive

This is the area of the Working copy that contains the text (*.txt) files that make up most of the pages of the website. Inside the working copy, the path is src/docroot/info/. Since this is where almost all of the editing work on the site happens, it maybe convenient to put a link to the info folder of your working copy on your desktop.

TurtleSVN

TurtleSVN is a program for sending and receiving changes between a local Working copy of a Subversion project and the Subversion repository. There is no fee for using Turtle SVN.