Help:Contents

Welcome

Welcome to our online repository for everything trail related within a reasonable distance from our club's center in Kingsport TN. The goal is to provide an easy way to find useful information about trails in our area so you can figure out where you want to go, how you'll get there, what to look for, and then provide a place to come back and update what you experienced for everyone's benefit.

Over time the scope has increased to include the parks that you use to access the trails. There is a particular focus on lodging options at the park and other activities and amenities the park provides.

Please contact us at webmaster@tehcc.org if you would like to share information or if you have questions on how to help or use the site.

Here just to use the site?

Great! Dive right in. We have many ways you can find trails to your liking.

• Use the search box - search for parks or trails that you may have heard about
• Use the trails list. The page is a little out of date with the format overhaul, but still a good resource. At some point this page will be fully automated to list the trails and parks automatically on the site.
• Use the Map of all trails. While the wiki has expanded to track more than just trails, this map (for now...) will show a map balloon for every documented trail with a trailhead GPS coordinate. Click on the balloon title to take you to that trail.
• Coming eventually - Searching based on criteria. With the page conversion to more searchable trail and park properties, you will soon be able to search for trails and parks based on the attributes you desire (trail distance, features, park with campground, parks with lots of miles of trails, etc.)

What's going on with this "conversion"?

A few times already I have mentioned this "conversion." Originally this site was a very "flat" or "static" system. Meaning Each page existed on its own from the rest. There was some shared "templates" or portions of a page, like a trail list. But the pages and templates had to be manually changed with every impacting addition. Meaning, if you added a trail, you also had to update the park page's trail list, the site trail list, and the park's trail count and trail tally. Now the sites can be tagged with properties and those properties searched and compiled by pages and templates. Now with that same example above, just creating the page and appropriately assigning location, features, and length the rest of the site automatically updates to include it.

Finding trails

• Alright, I'm trying to find trails to hike, but it's taking forever going through each page.

You've got lots of options here. You can search the map, we have our trails list which can be sorted alphabetically or by driving distance, by trail use, by category, or if you want to roll the dice, hit "Random page" on the left. Or try our recommendations at ClubWIKI:TopsList. Different paths for different interests.

Helping to contribute

• Well it's a great idea and all, but I hate coding. Oh well, wished I could help.

Hey! Not so fast. It's not really coding, yeah you have to do some markup, but it's nothing like writing a program or making a web page in HTML. If you follow other more complete pages, it should be fairly easy to follow along. It's mostly just writing.

• Yeah, well I hate writing too, regardless I don't want to spend my time writing web pages, I've got trails to hike during the day, and trips to plan at night.

Well then you're actually the kind of person we need most, gathering information. The hardest part very well could be collecting all of the trail information, how to get there, what to look for, pictures, GPS tracks, etc...

• Alright, you convinced me, how do I get this information to you?

Send it to me at webmaster@tehcc.org

• I changed my mind, how do I make changes to the site myself?

Well first I would suggest making a login by going to the upper right of the site and following the links

• Okay, I'm back and logged in. Hey I can edit without logging in, why did I just do that, are you going to spam me?

No, your email address is only for password recovery. Nothing else. Logging in helps identify who's doing what changes, so if needed we can discuss with you about your changes if we want to, plus you get logged for all of your changes and we can see how big of a help you are.

• Alright, let's get started!

OK, either you'll be creating new pages or adding to or editing existing pages. Adding to existing pages should be easy, just hit edit and find where you want the changes and do it. Here's some information on editing. If you're unsure, hit "show preview" before hitting "save page" to see how it would look. Again don't worry too much about messing up, we can always revert back to earlier revisions.

• It's a new trail I want to add

That's going to be a bit more work. But not too bad, We've got templates to make it easy on you and steps to follow. Best to follow ClubWiki:Creating_a_Trail for all of the steps needed. It's fairly easy, I promise.

• Well I'm confused, that's still too hard.

No problem, email me at webmaster@tehcc.org and let me know which trail and I'll add all of the needed pages and references so you can just add to the newly created page.

• Anything else?

Yeah, here's a page of links I often use for editing the site: Useful links to those administrating or heavily editing the site

Please contact us at webmaster@tehcc.org if you would like to share or if you have questions on how to help or use the site.