Since I‘ve been contracting again, I’ve been working for a few different companies; one of the things that I have found interesting is the different approach to version control. The latest experience was working at a company who use Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. It's a pretty ugly application but it did show the use of decent version control - something that some of the other places I have been could have done with.

So, working on my own stuff, I thought it was about time I put in place a more structured approach to version control than the ‘make a backup copy when I think about it’ approach.

Enter Subversion. I had heard the name bandied about, but never really looked much into it until I saw the Clickable Bliss video introducing Subversion, posted on Del.icio.us. I followed the instructions in the video and then added SvnX into the mix (an OS X GUI svn client).

Brilliant. Sweet version control goodness.

One little thing that makes life easier for web developers:- make your working directory part of your local web server document root (I use a copy of apache/mysql/php5 on my local machine for web development before deploy), that way you can check it in a ‘live’ environment.

Also see this tutorial.

SteamSHIFT out.

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