This is the development page for my master's thesis. If you are lost, start here.
This is GitHub, it is a place to manage files that are being developed by lots of people. It's mostly used by software developers, but it's a great tool for anybody who is doing long-term or collaborative writing. In an effort and experiment in transparency I've decided to make this project public.
GitHub is just the online front-end for the program git, which is perhaps the most important verison control software ever made. It allows you to take an image of the file every time that you change it, and manage these changes across multiple users, allowing for multi-branch development. Git only works on text files, which is one of the reasons that I prefer to write in LaTeX, which is basically a programming languauge for typsetting pdfs, but don't worry, it's highly "non-user legible."
To see what is new, click on the little clock with the backward arrow on the top right corner of the main text frame of this page. It's right next to the word "commits." This will show you a timeline of changes.
To see the most recent pdf, just click on thesis.pdf on the main page. The other files can be openened in this way. Github can't show changes in binary files like pdfs, so if you want to see what is different in each stage you can open the history of thesis.tex or, look at the most recent thesis.diff.pdf. I generate the .diff(erence) files after every revision from Dr. Stefaniak so that he can more easily track my edits. These revisions can be found in the "Issues" section of the page, where I ask readers to post their edits and revisions. If you know LaTeX and git, please do this by creating a branch and submitting a pull request, but for most users, just do pdf comments and attatch them to the issue.
There is also a website for this project where you can download the newest pdf in the simplest way possible. This is the link that I give to most people when they pretend to want to read my thesis, rather than emailing them versions which become immediately out of date. You can find it here: https://meadowlarke.github.io/Thesis/