My “versioning for all news stories!” manifesto inspired lots of feedback. A good amount of it was along the lines of, “What are you talking about? How would this work?” I’ve been pointing people to Wikipedia’s “view history” tabs, which are a great start. (I also notice that the Guardian UK now posts, on each article, a story history, which tells you that the article was modified, but doesn’t actually show you the different versions.)
What I’d like to do now is pursue this at the level of a live demo right here on this blog. So I put out a call on Twitter for help in creating a WordPress plugin that would let me expose every version of each post. I only want to show the versions since publication — a rough draft pre-publication should remain for the author’s (and editor’s, if there is any) eyes only.
Scott Carpenter helpfully pointed me to this existing plugin, which outputs a list of all versions of each post.
This is a great start. All I need now is to add a little code to the plugin that gets it to show only the post-publication versions.
I know just enough about PHP to mess around with templates and cut-and-paste code snippets, but not enough, I think, to do this right. Anyone interested in helping out on this little project?
Someday, when this versioning thing catches on and becomes a universal practice, you’ll be able to say to yourself, with a little smile of satisfaction, “I was there when it all began.”
Post Revisions:
- July 23, 2010 @ 07:59:02 [Current Revision] by Scott Rosenberg
- July 23, 2010 @ 07:55:25 by Scott Rosenberg