Dear WeatherCat users who get their hands dirty with code from time to time,
I'm still struggling to get the website for my trusty wagon in truly presentable shape. Recently, to my horror, I realized I had changed something that caused the history page to expand to greater width than the other pages. I made a few "good guesses" as to what the problem was and -
every guess was wrong! So what to do? I was reasonably sure when I first uploaded the page the error wasn't present. Programmers use what is called "revision control." Every change you make to your project is recorded. So when something breaks, you can go back to the last time it wasn't broken and try to figure out what happened.
Alas, I don't know of any single-user system for version control. However, I run Time Machine as Apple originally configured it. So I could go back to the version of the file on any day. Sure enough the problem was introduced by the edits I had done on August 2nd. I recovered the files from August 1st and 2nd and then ran the UNIX
diff command to find out exactly what I had changed. It turned out I had improperly configured a table and that was the sort of the trouble. Once I had identified the problem, it was easy to splice the correction into my current file.
Time Machine is obviously a life-saver if you need to restore your system. However, you can use it in more mundane ways. It doesn't take much more space to allow it to save all the changes to your files. You don't change files all that often. So this is a case were a tool that is useful for a critical need can be useful in other more mundane, but nonetheless very helpful, ways.
Cheers, Edouard