the only copy was the live one

I put this site under version control today. That’s the whole announcement, and it isn’t news, except for the part where it took me this long.

Every change to this theme went straight to the live server from a folder on my laptop. The folder is named version six. That’s how I’ve been tracking versions — a number in the directory name. It reads like a system. It’s a note I keep for myself and never consult.

What that costs is specific. I couldn’t have shown you what the theme looked like a week ago. I couldn’t have told you which lines I changed to fix something, or how to get back. When the fonts turned out never to have loaded, the only reason I know when it started is that I remember deciding it.

The safety net had the same shape. There’s a rollback path in the deploy script, and it pointed at a baseline from before the redesign, which means the get-me-out button would have restored a theme I no longer wanted and dropped everything since. I’d never tested it. A net you haven’t fallen into feels like insurance.

So the repository has one commit and 366 files. One line of config pins the shell scripts to Unix line endings, because a Windows checkout would rewrite them. I’d rather not spend an evening on carriage returns.

The commit isn’t the interesting part. The interesting part is the other folder on this disk. It has the actual thinking in it, commits of its own, and nowhere to push them. That’s the one I’d mind losing. I fixed the site first, because the site is the part I can see.