It’s always fascinating to see how applying good practice in one area can lead to unforeseen benefits. The article on version control with subversion in the latest issue of A List Apart is a fine example of just that. Not only is the use of version control a good way to manage your own projects, it’s a vital enabler for significant shifts in working practices and management styles. ...
A recent comment reminded me of an old entry proposing yet another project I never had time to follow through with: Using Trac and Subversion with Social Documents. The idea there was to make use of subversion’s utility for version control and trac’s existing frontend for browsing that to present versioned documents. In hindsight, I don’t think trac would actually be a good frontend for this unless the intended audience was entirely techies. Trac works for those of us who use it every day to follow a variety of projects, and its ability to combine a wiki with version control of the ‘official’ versions of documents provides some interesting ideas, but the interface just wouldn’t work. ...
As I’ve touched on before, one of the areas I’ve been exploring as part of the Social Documents projects is ways of managing document revisions. With a major United Nations summit coming up in September (and the 60th anniversary of the charter on Sunday) I’d like my UN Charter site to be better equipped to handle any amendments to the charter that might be made, but as more and more public documents come online it will be important to be able to look back through their histories and see how they’ve evolved. ...