Creating your OWN Disruptive Expertise repository

What is this about and why are we doing it?

To work on a website together, it’s important to learn how we can we work simultaneously and non-destructively. It’s much less stressful to create or edit your own essay knowing that you can’t really mess up anything or anyone else.

So, we use a feature of GitHub to allow everyone to make their own copy of Disruptive Expertise and edit that without fear of breaking anything. When you’re 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 Disruptive Expertise.

Create a GitHub account

• First, you need a free GitHub account for your repository.
• 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 Disruptive Expertise 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 Disruptive Expertise repository, and click the Fork button near the upper right corner (don’t click the number). It’s just below the top nav icons.
• We want the default settings and name, so just click the green “Create fork” button at the bottom right.
• 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 amaranth-unm 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 Disruptive Expertise site. This is ables you to see how your essay looks as a webpage online (instead of just code that you’re editing).

• 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 main
• 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 Disruptive Expertise site. It looks EXACTLY the same, but is being built from YOUR repository.

Start Editing

Once everything is working, it’s time to set up your own essay.