Human-faced beanstalks

I’m in love.

No, not a girl. It’s Beanstalk: hosted Subversion. This is so cool.

For the non-geeky among you, Subversion is one of the more popular version control systems out there. And what’s version control? I’ll let A Visual Guide to Version Control answer that question.

So, Beanstalk is a hosted Subversion (SVN) repository. No hassles. The site’s a beauty to look at and to use, and everything works seamlessly. Sure, the free account is only 20 megs, but it’s not bad. I’m very much a fan.

Why would you use this? Version control has been primarily the domain of programmers, but it’s really useful for all sorts of other things. I’m using my Beanstalk repository for my writing — I’ve got directories for books, stories, poetry, plays, essays, etc. — and so I’ve got an automatic offsite backup along with a perfectly preserved history of any changes I make. Bliss.

I plan to start using this for my hand-coded websites as well (Blank Slate and Riverglen Press, mainly). And for the books I digitize. I’d use it for my design/art, too, but those files get really big really quick. Maybe someday…

Anyway, Beanstalk is exceedingly cool. If you do anything with text — coding, writing, whatever — you need to think about backing up with Beanstalk.

Hey Ben,
That’s really cool. I was seriously wondering about this sort of thing one or two days ago. I’ve been doing some writing and brainstorming using WikidPad as my editor, which has the option of storing a local wiki in plain text files. The only thing missing was to have a remote subversion repository to track changes with. Nice pointer.

Glad it was of use, Josh. Enjoy. :)