Since my previous post, I have been experimenting with ways to represent the contents of this type of narrative crop guide as a ‘repository’ on github. A githup repo is a lot closer to working with a database than the equivalent setup with Google Docs or Google Sites.
Example
A published web page looks like this: Selection | Commonwealth Cushaw
The table of contents on the left side of this site is based mainly on the topics of the 2024 emailed crop guides. Please feel free to look at other pages. I’m in the process of adapting the existing squash guides for C. argyrosperma, and some pages are still placeholders.
One of my favorite parts of a site like this is the “Edit this page on GitHub” link at the bottom of the content:
To me, the philosophy or values expressed by that kind of link are just as important as the functionality!
A Github repository plus a documentation publishing tool is a combination that is used to publish documentation for all kinds of open source software projects. This service hosts the database in a way that is designed to make it easy for other people to contribute to or make copies of the data for their own uses.
The content is stored as relatively simple “Markdown” text. (That is one of the same formatting syntaxes that this discourse forum uses.) Images and image captions are the part that can be a tricky to learn, but even with images, I find Markdown text to be pretty easy to read.
These tools do have a steeper learning curve than Google Docs or Google Sites, but they are much better at tracking changes over time and facilitating other reuses of the same data.
Source code
The cushaw “Selection” page is created from source that looks like this:
---
parent: Growing guide
title: Selection
layout: default
---
# Selection
This section explores ways to identify exceptional plants among the population (a process known as "selection"). In order to understand how selection relates to sexual propagation in squash, this section incorporates concepts related to manual and open pollination.
## What is Selection?
{:class="float-right-third"}
In this guide, "selection" refers to actions taken by the gardener to choose which plants should be prioritized, which might be manually "crossed" together in the pursuit of a hybrid, and which plants should be culled or eliminated.
### Selection for an established variety
Whether you are maintaining an existing heirloom variety or a diverse landrace of plants, the work of selection is focused on elimination -- or "roguing" -- plants with undesirable characteristics, while making sure to save ample seed from plants which do exemplify the variety.
### Selection for a new variety
When developing or improving a genetic line, selection might instead be focused on what to include. In this scenario it is most important to identify and prioritize plants that stand out from the rest in positive ways.
I have two ideas about managing information like this over time.
The first is to try to have a primary, canonical, “full” copy of the information somewhere where it can be publicly accessed and easily copied for reuse and backup.
The second is that human editors will be needed over time to manage additions and help edit alternate versions of the content. Often this is probably editing shorter versions for use in a situation where the full content isn’t appropriate.
I think a good information management scheme can probably ensure that we can easily find and copy the cultivation information for a species, but editing the information for use in an email sequence or cutting it down to the length of a seed packet or flyer will probably always involve some manual human intervention.
This is the github repo being used to generate the site: GitHub - markwkidd/cushaw-handbook