versioning
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Versioning is the practice of keeping previous versions of a post or other item available (possibly through a record of edits, AKA edit history). It may be useful for transparency, historical interest, or undoing changes.
Why
For yourself: so you can view your own edit history.
For others: you may want to show others the edit history of your posts.
How
(TBD)
IndieWeb Examples
Anyone using Git-based or other version controlled publishing software will have previous versions available.
- Emma Kuo using Skein on http://notenoughneon.com since 2016-05-19.
- Content is stored as static HTML + MF2 on S3, and mirrored on github.
- Posts and webmentions generate commits to https://github.com/notenoughneon/notenoughneon.github.io
- Kevin Marks publishes a static site via github, so posts have edit history eg HTML vs TeX
- Ryan Barrett commits often change existing posts eg this changes /beer, /books, /movies, and a few others
Software
MediaWiki
MediaWiki provides browsable version history of all pages and allows one to compare pairs of edits.
The only edits not easily browsable are page deletions.
WordPress
WordPress keeps a version history of posts and pages which is only viewable from the admin area unless exposed by a theme or plugin. [1]
DokuWiki
DokuWiki, like MediWiki, provides browsable version history of all pages and allows one to compare pairs of edits. The versions are stored as simple text files each representing a version of the page (optionally compressed) [2].
Silo Examples
Facebook has a little top-right corner dropdown menu for every post and comment you make that shows an "Edit Post" or "Edit Comment" option respectively, that when chosen allow you to edit that post/comment, save, and then shows an "Edited" greytext by the post which when clicked shows a version history of the post/comment from oldest to newest.
Dropdown menu:
Edited comment:
Version history:
Source Control Management
A SCM (Source Control Management) is typically used to maintain the history of changes in a codebase, but can be used for any kind of files, like the content of a blog. Popular SCMs are:
- Git
- Subversion (SVN)
- Mercurial