#1 Use Version Control!

Show Notes

This is the real first episode of the Open Source Creative Podcast! And it’s a bit of a weird place to start: version control systems. It’s not something that many creative folks think about when producing their work… and that’s a mistake. If you’re doing digital work, your data is your work. So it’s in your best interest (and your clients' interests, if you’re doing this professionally) to preserve it and track it. In this episode I talk about the open source options available (predominantly Mercurial, Git, and Subversion) and why I tend to use one over the others (hint: its chemical symbol is Hg).

Below are some links to some other things I cover in the show (roughly in the chronological order that I talk about them):

• NOX renderer - This raytracing renderer was recently released as open source by EverMotion
• GIMP 2.8.14 - GIMP had two releases in one week, both of them bugfix releases
• PodcastGenerator - A pretty cool comprehensive solution to getting a podcast posted as quickly and efficiently as possible
• Subversion - A centralized version control system that I used to use more extensively
• Bazaar - A distributed version control system that doesn’t get enough love
• Git - The preferred version control system for most coders
• Mercurial - My preferred version control system for creative projects
• TortoiseHg - A nice graphical front end for mercurial
• Handling OpenDocument files with Mercurial and oodiff - Using Mercurial’s extdiff extension with odt2txt for sane diffs of ODT files (I really should do a separate blog post or video dedicated to this)
• Sass - A CSS pre-processor, billed as “CSS with superpowers”
• Bones - A nice barebones Wordpress theme that uses Sass

And, of course, I made a special plea to the developers of LibreOffice: Please provide command line access to the Compare Documents utility. It would make me happy.

(BTW, for you more professional web designers out there, I know that Sass has been around for a good long while. This was just the first time that I’d sat down and forced myself to use it.)

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