Post

Maggie Appleton
@maggieappleton.com

I've wanted versioning on my digital garden for ages. Felt like a critical missing piece. Making my own dreams come true over here. Hard but fun to design this. These aren't automatically generated – I intentionally decide when to make new versions. Not every edit = new version. Only major updates

6 reposts125 likes

Maggie Appleton
@maggieappleton.com

Wanted a way to preserve old content that lots of people had already linked to, referenced, or written about. But still be able to iterate on my work. Older versions have their own URLs. Latest version gets the canonical. Readers can see then they're on an older version and jump to the latest.

George Powell
@snail.city

If I link the latest version of one of your articles as a reference, will that link stay consistent to the version I referenced? How does that work if the latest version always gets the canonical?

Maggie Appleton
@maggieappleton.com

Sadly, no. This is one of the harder design decisions, and something I'm trying to find a solution to. The latest lives at canonical, older versions live at /v1/title Because only some of my posts will have versions, it didn't make sense to put /v1/ in every url. Want to keep root-level urls.

Maggie Appleton
@maggieappleton.com

Not ideal, but other solutions got finicky. I'm trying to design a workaround that gives people the option to link to a specific version, even if there aren't multiple versions yet. It'll be some enhanced "copy link" / "reference this post" option in the header that will guarantee the right version.

Fernando Gros
@fernandogros.com

This is fascinating. My blog has 20 years of writing. I'm in the process of moving away from WordPress and trying to decide how much of that writing should stay on line and what to do with updating some of it.

jmarlena
@jmarlena.bsky.social

Ha, few people dream of versioning but this looks and works great. Can you dream of a better way to version Markdown tables in a file that is used to single source different versions of a docs site? 🤪 BTW, did you know the periodic table came together in a scientist’s dream?? 💭

Nicholas Macias
@nich.bsky.social

I’ve been trying to imagine an entire blog as CRDT but stuck (extremely adhd style) on trying to remember what it was called circa 2001 when designers killed their css and rebuilt live. I swear it was CSS Reset. Anyway, this it helpful to see.