Josh On Design

I have a webserver. It's a small box sharing a friend's static DSL line with a few other boxes. It does the job pretty well, hosting the websites for my family members. When the blogging revolution hit I wrote some journaling software for myself. It was written in Perl originally, later switching to a servlet with XSLTs. This was great for me but not so great for my sister when she wanted a weblog. She can write HTML and copy links. That's about it. No javascript and certainly no knowledge of XSL templating. My solution was to switch to JSPs. I told her as long as you don't edit these magic tags everything will be fine. All is good until she says she wants a counter.

In my years as a professional programmer I have used many Revision Control Systems (RCSes). It's that software that manages and protects the software you use. One of the tools of the toolmaker. Many companies pay tens of thousands of dollars for this software, often licensing it per-seat, and yet a perfectly good free alternative exists: CVS. In fact I will argue that there almost no reasons not to use CVS. While there are some other RCSes which beat CVS on technical grounds like parallel development I think that CVS has the edge in everything that counts.