I save about twenty drafts — that’s ten meg of disc space — and the last one contains all the final alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers, there’s a cry here of ‘Tough shit, literary researchers of the future, try getting a proper job!’ and the rest are wiped.

What’s good for this discussion is that the server maintains versions of every file (I think they claim infinite). So it automatically keeps a revision history, even if you delete the file locally. It makes it very hard to lose your work.

Myself, I use Subversion via tortoisesvn on Windows because my machine that I use for writing is also the machine I need for work and that means MS Word. It’s not every 15 minutes, but instead a commit basis for me.

However, being able to pull back previous versions and make diffs certainly creates an eerie experience, especially when I am wondering why I went in a direction that I did and forgot the nuance that lead up to the decision.

The side benefit of the SVN system is that it also gives me another off-site backup.

I’ve moved from writing in Open Office to yWriter, since I’m shackled to Windowz by my graphics apps — same thing thing that keeps me using, at least some of the time, a desktop behemoth.

yWriter has good paranoid backup method deep down in its guts, and I add to that directory-level file sync across machines in multiple locations, but I would seriously dig having the quantity of logging that you’ve got there.

Bugger the historians, I want that kind of data-tracking so I can reverse engineer my own process!

Also the system probably works fine with binary files like MS word documents. You just lose some of the wonderful diffing abilities.

Combine this with TimeMachine and you could have something interesting.

Oh, and Cory’s setup out to include a snapshot from the camera attached to the machine with the rest. Historians will want to see the expressions of bemusement, wonder, boredom, worry etc that go with each step in the writing process.

So, why does it use python? Is it because he only has a hammer so everything is a nail?

No, python’s more like a Leatherman; if you already have it in your hand, why bother reaching for another tool?

Your gmake example is admittedly ridiculous, but I find python extremely useful for actually getting stuff done; even if python’s not absolutely the best way to do something, it’s often the quickest way.

I’ve just been doing something similar to this project, using python to manipulate SVN-controlled files; pysvn was very useful for this.

For the version control, I used Mercurial. Now I can take my HP Mini-Note along with me as a digital note-taking device, secure in the knowledge that, when I get back home, I can easily sync the work done between my various other systems, all the while maintaining a complete audit trail of my note-taking activities.

My Mini-Note’s name? Moleskine, of course! :-)

A git-based file system. Sort of…

I understand the need for a centralised versioning repository, but for a local repository this seems like reinventing the wheel.

# URL to the RSS feed, Atom support is coming soon
feed:http://www.mysite.com/feed

Er, the URL to what RSS feed? I don’t even have a webserver. Am I supposed to set up my (so far unused) git installation to publish RSS? How do I do this?

Just for the record, I don’t work for a particular publishing house, just a freelance editor, but I’d like to start one of my own as nobody in my country (Argentina) seems very interested in ebooks at all. Oh well, talk about dinosaurs!

John Cooke, right now the limiter on a Windows version is some of the stock plugin code. If you want, I can provide you instructions on disabling the problem plugins in exchange for your willingness to try it on Windows. The current version should only depend on a valid Python installation. To get a fully compatible version, I’d need help testing Windows’ specific plugins for identifying timezone (on which the weather plugin relies, too) and uptime (if at all possible under windows).

In the next major revision, I will have fully fleshed out the plugins, including documenting how to enable/disable the stock plugins for anyone who wants to start experimenting with altering the commit message flashbake generates.

Soon we will simply be leasing everything we “own”.
..Have to pay extra to read books aloud, must pay extra to have music at work and home, must renew my subscription to my own movie collection…

Big brother is billing you…

Often when I’m coding I’d like to have a kind of ‘timeline slider’ that I could just quickly scratch back to an earlier version, copy a bit of older code to the clipboard and scratch back to the latest version again to paste it back in.

Combine this with bzr, and motivated authors and editors, and you get an inexpensive, crowd-sourced, publishing house with baked-in peer review.

Let’s see if the publishing dinosaurs take note of such chances. Doubt it.

I wouldn’t really be very interested in Flashbake, though – for the time being, I think once a day is granularity enough for me. But I like the idea, because that means you never actually forget to commit and push.

cmdln, I don’t suppose you’d be interested in creating a portable apps version, would you?

Brilliant!

This reminds me of a post I read this morning, a guy at mozilla rewriting GNU Make in Python, supposedly to increase performance, although his implementation is currently 10x slower than gmake.

For word processing files I simply depend on my own naming standard. Baseline file begins as “MyCoolStory1a” and then rev through 1b, 1c, etc, creating a new file on each pass. When I send a piece out for critiquing, I roll the number to 2a. I find it makes a lot more sense because the revisions are keyed to revisions I plan rather than simple time stamps. Combined with the Windows Briefcase utility, it all works pretty clean.

- Kevin N. Haw