[WEB4LIB] RE: Library Home Pages : historical view?

[sean dreilinger]

"Hal P. Kirkwood" wrote:
> Question to all the many libraries that have mentioned they are in the
> middle of a Web redesign...

its the hallmark of a living information service :-)

> Are you keeping a copy or snapshots, etc of the old design for posterity's
> sake?  So that you can look back and see how your site has developed and
> changed?

a well-kept secret of the software engineering community called SCM or
software configuration management can accomplish this (unlimited
historical views), and more, when applied to your web development.

SCM is usually a development process/practice combined with automation
(version control) to help software developers track their source code at
the most ridiculous, meticulous levels of detail -- a well managed SCM
system can pull up past and concurrent snapshots of your project (a web
site, a large multi-author document, or even computer program source
code :-) as it existed at any particular date and time, and offer visual
(web page) and code-level (html source) views of every single change
that anyone made since day one. 

SCM can also automate routine web maintenance hassles like
staging/posting content, providing an audit trail of who made what
change when, stopping authors from uploading conflicting web pages or
overwriting one anothers work, providing a way to `roll back' mistakes
quickly, mirroring content onto multiple servers, and maintaining
variant branches of a web site - such as different templates adapted for
branch library web sites or seasonal website themes (one for banned book
week, one for national leprechaun week, etc.) all based on the same core
HTML documents -- its very cool stuff.

many commercial SCM products have extended their product line to mention
SCM for web development, and there are Free/open source tools available
to do the same - CVS (concurrent versions system) is definitely worth a
look: http://www.cyclic.com/ - it runs across all the major operating
systems and none of your web authors need to switch any authoring tools
- they just run a cvs command before and after each editing session. 

notes on how we used CVS at interactivate.com to automate and streamline
the web development process and web maintenance for upwards of a dozen
web sites: http://durak.org/cvswebsites/

it slices! it dices! i'll stop here but if anyone wants an earful of
``CVS-your-website!'' evangelism just write me :-)

--
mailto:sean at savvysearch.com                sean dreilinger, mlis
 http://www.savvysearch.com                http://durak.org/sean