Creating your OWN Campus History repository

What is this about and why are we doing it?

As part of the public history aspect of the course, it’s important to learn how we can we work collaboratively and non-destructively. And it’s much less stressful to create or edit essays knowing that you can’t really mess anything up.

So, we use a feature of GitHub to allow everyone to make their own copy of Campus History and edit that without fear of breaking anything. When a set of changes are done and you want to publish those changes on the live site, you can easily do that. This guide describes the process of setting up your own copy of Campus History.

Create a GitHub account

• Go to github.com and click the “Sign up” button.
• I highly recommend your UNM email, but use whatever you want.
• Your username can be your UNM NetID, or something totally different.

Fork the intro-guide repository

In GitHub speak, forking means to create your own copy of someone else’s public repository so that you can play around with your own copy and leave the original alone.

• Be sure you are logged into GitHub
• Go to the Campus History repository, and click the Fork button in the upper right corner (don’t click the number).
• We want the default settings, so just click the green “Create fork” button.
• You’ll see the page refresh within 5-10 seconds.
• Notice the URL! It looks like nothing on the page changed, but you are now looking at a repository UNDER YOUR OWN ACCOUNT. This is evident from the URL and the top left of the GitHub page. The live repository will always have unm-digital-history in the URL, and the URL for your “fork” of it will have your GitHub username. Either way, the list of files looks exactly the same (for now).

Enable your website

You now have a “local” copy of the repository, which is all files that make the website work. Now, let’s enable your own working copy of the Campus History site. As you edit your essay, you can see how the essays actually look online (instead of just Markdown files with code snippets).

• Click the Settings nav link near the top of the page
• Click the Pages link on the left nav
• Click the button that says None and change it to master
• Click the Save button
• Click the Actions tab, and wait for the orange yellow dot to turn green
• Click on Settings and then Pages again.
• Click the “Visit site” button to see YOUR COPY of the Campus History site. It looks EXACTLY the same, but is being built from YOUR repository.