A lot of people call weblogging software "Content Management Systems." I think this fits only in the loosest sense, as most weblogging packages are really 'Content Delivery Systems' with a little CMS thrown in.

Real content management is the domain of tools which, contrary to their mandate, are so difficult to insert into the regular process flow of data creation, modification, and deployment, that it's not used anywhere near as often as it should be, and is usually used only where it has to be, say where programmers are all working concurrently on a codebase. That's where concurrent versioning comes in.

To handle simultaneous access, file locking, merging, source branching, and all that, your options are few. You can buy, deploy, learn and mandate the use of an expensive package like Interwoven or Perforce, use something slightly less expensive but with a host of other workflow problems like Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, or you can do what millions of geeks do and learn to use CVS, or Concurrent Versioning system, an open-source implementation atop RCS, another open-source tool.

The beauty of personal content management is really seen when you use it for more than just code. It will save every version of a file, so when you want to go back and get that paragraph you edited out of your great american novel five weeks ago, it's there for you. If you think your site redesign was a mistake, a year after you launched it, you can rol back the templates to the way they all were at any specific date.

CVS isn't trivial to learn, especially if you're setting up and running your own CVS server, but kudos to Apple for publishing a how-to article Mac OS X: Version Control with CVS.

I encourage the mac and the (far more common) PC user to check out the article. You can get CVS for virtually any platform, and its benefits aren't tied to the OS.

It's early, I'm running a bit late, and I just woke up 20 minutes ago, so I'm not running at full-proselytizing speed, but CVS is really cool, is something that by all rights should be built-in to the fabric of any modern OS (especially when hard drives cost $250 for 120 gigs), and can totally save your ass. Now that I've turned aside from proprietary data formats like Microsoft Word (my last year in college I wrote everything in HTML with a simple stylesheet. It's really nice to be able to read, edit, and publish anywhere, especially when you don't need Word's featurebloat for a simple paper), CVS becomes even more useful, as the diff and merge functionality is easily comprehended, and only actual changes are saved, instead of resaving a whole file because you changed 'teh' to 'the.'

Okay, shower time, then takin' the train to work. Happy Friday!