For the programme owner only
How to run LIMA PULSE
No technical knowledge needed. Work through this once and the platform is live. After that, most weeks you do nothing at all.
This page is part of the site but is not linked from the public pages. Anyone who has the address can read it, so it contains no passwords — keep those only in your own account.
What LIMA PULSE is made of
Four things. Nothing else to maintain.
- This website — the Library and the Record. Free, permanent, nobody can upload to it.
- Two forms — "Log an Activity" and "Session Feedback". Free.
- One spreadsheet — fills itself from the forms. Private to you.
- One folder — attendance photos and signed papers. Private, shared only with people you name.
Step 1 · Create the programme account
Do not use your personal email for this. Create a new free Google account that belongs to the programme, not to you — for example [email protected].
It takes three minutes at accounts.google.com/signup, and it means the programme can one day be handed to a successor instead of ending with your personal login. This single choice is the difference between a project and an institution.
Write the password down somewhere safe and physical. Give a sealed copy to your centre director.
Step 2 · Build the two forms
Done — August 2026
Both forms are built and live
They live in [email protected] — the programme account, separate from any personal account. Every submission writes a row into its own Google Sheet automatically. Nothing needs to be re-created; what follows is the record of how they are built, so anyone can rebuild or extend them later.
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Activity Log — fill in after every session, drill, audit or check | open the form · edit it |
| Activity Log — the responses sheet | open the sheet |
| Session Feedback — anonymous, four questions | open the form · edit it |
| Feedback — the responses sheet | open the sheet |
The two edit links and the two sheets open only for people signed in to the programme account, or anyone it has been shared with. The two form links are open to anyone who has them — that is deliberate: a nurse at 3 a.m. should not have to hunt for a password to record what happened.
For the record, this is what each form contains. To build a third form later, sign in to that account, go to forms.google.com and press the + for a blank form.
Form one
LIMA PULSE — Log an Activity
Add these questions. The starred ones matter most; the rest can be optional.
| Question | Type |
|---|---|
| Date of the activity ★ | Date |
| What kind of activity? ★ Teaching session · Skills station · Case simulation · Unannounced drill · Crash cart check · Boat & escort bag check · Sea transfer · Case debrief · Other | Multiple choice |
| Title or topic ★ | Short answer |
| Which LIMA PULSE day does this relate to? Day 1–5, or "Not linked to a day" | Multiple choice |
| Who led it? ★ | Short answer |
| Who attended? ★ One name per line | Paragraph |
| How many attended? ★ | Short answer |
| Photo of the signed attendance sheet ★ | File upload |
| How long did it take, in minutes? | Short answer |
| Anything that went wrong, or needs following up? | Paragraph |
The file upload question is the important one. A dated entry with a photograph of real signatures attached is exactly the evidence an auditor asks for and almost never receives. Google Forms requires the person to be signed in to a Google account for file upload — if that is a problem for your staff, remove it and instead ask them to send you the photo, then file it yourself.
Form two
LIMA PULSE — Session Feedback
Keep it to four questions. Anonymous. Under thirty seconds, or people will not do it.
| Question | Type |
|---|---|
| Which session was this? | Short answer |
| How useful was this for the work you actually do? | Scale 1–5 |
| How confident do you feel doing this in a real emergency now? | Scale 1–5 |
| What one thing would you change? | Paragraph |
In form settings, make sure email addresses are not collected. Anonymous feedback is honest feedback.
Then get each link
Press Send at the top of the form, choose the link icon, tick Shorten URL, and copy it. Google also gives you a QR code for that link — print it and put it on the crash cart, the resus room wall, and the last slide of every session.
Step 3 · Paste the links in
Open the folder, go into assets, and open the file config.js with Notepad or any text editor.
You will see this near the top. Paste each link between the quote marks, keeping the quote marks:
logActivity: "https://forms.gle/xxxxxxxx", feedback: "https://forms.gle/yyyyyyyy", evidenceFolder: "https://drive.google.com/...",
Save the file. Every page on the site updates at once — you never edit the buttons individually.
A link left empty is not an error. Its button simply says "not set up yet" and sends the reader here.
Already done for the two forms. The links are also written directly into every page when the site is rebuilt, so the buttons still work in places that block JavaScript — an iPhone file preview, the single-file edition, a copy opened straight from a zip.
Step 4 · Put the site online
Done — August 2026
The programme lives at limapulse.org
The domain is owned by this centre, registered at Cloudflare, and the site is served from Cloudflare Pages in the same account. One address, held permanently, independent of any person's laptop.
Why a domain of our own matters: a free host's address belongs to the host. A domain belongs to the programme. If the hosting ever changes, the address printed on the wall posters and written into Ministry correspondence does not.
To publish an update — after any change to the folder:
Sign in at dash.cloudflare.com
With the programme account.
Open Workers & Pages → the LIMA PULSE project
Then Create deployment.
Drag the folder — or the zip — onto the page
The whole thing at once. Cloudflare keeps every previous version, so a bad update can be rolled back in one click.
Wait about thirty seconds
The address does not change. Everyone who already has the link, and every printed QR code, keeps working.
Cost: the domain only, about $10 a year. The hosting is free at this size and will stay free.
Is it public?
Technically it sits on the internet, but every page carries an instruction telling Google and other search engines not to list it. It is linked from nowhere, and the address cannot be guessed.
In practice: only people you send the link to will ever see it. When you want the Ministry to see your work, you send them the link. Nothing needs rebuilding. If you later want it findable — for a prize submission, for instance — tell me and it is a one-line change.
Step 5 · Give someone the private evidence
Attendance photos, named audits and individual scores never go on the website. They live in a Drive folder.
To let a Ministry auditor or your director see it:
- Open the folder in Google Drive
- Click Share
- Type their email address
- Choose Viewer — not Editor
- Send
They sign in with their own email and see everything. You can remove them the same way at any moment, and Drive records who opened what and when — which counts in your favour at an inspection, not against you.
Never put a password on a web page to protect this data. On a site like this, the password sits inside the page's own code and anyone can read it. It looks secure and is not.
Adding new material later
A new document
Put the file into the downloads folder. Open build.js, find the day it belongs to, and copy one of the existing lines in its resources list — change the title, the description and the filename. Save, then run node build.js. Drag the folder to Netlify again.
A whole new day or topic
In build.js, copy an entire day block and change its number, name and contents. A new page is created automatically, correctly styled, linked from the hub and from every other day. You never touch the design.
A video
Never put video files in the folder — they are large and stream badly on a weak connection. Upload to YouTube as Unlisted (not Private, not Public), then use that link as the resource address. Unlisted means it never appears in search and only people with the link can watch.
The Record numbers
Open build.js and edit the four figures on the Record page, then rebuild. Once you have a few months of real entries, ask me to connect it to your spreadsheet so it updates itself.
What to actually do, and how often
| When | What | Time |
|---|---|---|
| After any activity | Whoever ran it fills the form. Not you. | 90 seconds |
| Every month | Open the spreadsheet, read the new entries, file the attendance photos into the folder by month. | 15 minutes |
| Every 3 months | Update the Record counters and rebuild. Read the feedback comments. | 30 minutes |
| Every year | Check the material against the current published guidelines. Update the version number and the version history on the About page. | A morning |
The only rule the centre needs to know
If it happened, it goes in LIMA PULSE.
Say it at the launch. Put it on the wall next to the QR code. A session nobody logged is a session that, to anyone who asks a year from now, never took place.