blips

Gina Trapani’s post on Flashbake led me to Cory Doctorow’s discussion:

Every 15 minutes, Flashbake looks at any files that you ask it to check (I have it looking at all my fiction-in-progress, my todo list, my file of useful bits of information, and the completed electronic versions of my recent books), and records any changes made since the last check, annotating them with the current timezone on the system-clock, the weather in that timezone as fetched from Google, and the last three headlines with your by-line under them in your blog’s RSS feed (I’ve been characterizing this as “Where am I, what’s it like there, and what am I thinking about?”). It also records your computer’s uptime. For a future version, I think it’d be fun to have the most recent three songs played by your music player.

The effect of this is to thoroughly — exhaustively — annotate the entire creative process, almost down to the keystroke level. Want to know what day you wrote a particular passage? Flashbake can tell you. Want to know what passage you wrote on a given day? That too. Plus, keeping track of my todo.txt file means that I get a searchable database of all the todo items I’ve ever used, with timestamps for their appearance and erasure.

Wow.  Won’t say much about syncing the weather and all that to one’s drafts (this seems interesting on one level, on another level seems like stuff only interesting to literary scholars a hundred years in the future who are desparately searching for a dissertation topic not already covered) I’ve been using subversion for a little over a year to do something similar.  While Cory doesn’t like having to manually commit changes to the repository, I love this feature and is exactly why I use subversion.  Every time I make some progress on  a draft, I commit it, and write a little note about what I’ve done.  I can then view the log and see all the progress I’ve made on a manuscript.  I can also review where I made big decisions (the other day I made a note on my CCCCs proposal draft about how I swapped some paragraphs around).  If I decide to reverse that decision, I know exactly what version to return to.  Pretty sweet.  Easy on macs and Windows.  If you have dreamhost or another web hosting service with subversion, you can even sync these to the web and have your stuff available on any computer.