A significant downside of printed books and documents is that they can’t be updated. That is to say, unless you acquire a new edition, should there be any. The Internet comes with the advantage that it allows to update content worldwide, in a fraction of an instant.

Updating is important: originals are hardly ever typo-free; speculations might turn out to be wrong; phrasing could prove ambiguous. And most importantly, the readers feedback can significantly help improve the argumentation and need be taken into account.

The general trend around blogging seems to go in the other direction: articles are often published and left as-is, never to be edited.

As such, many blog articles are struck by the inescapable flail of time and technological advancement: they run out of fashion and lose much of their original value.

But there is a motivation behind this immobility: the ability to edit removes the guarantee that readers can access the article in its original form. Content could be lost in the process. External references become meaningless if the content has been removed or changed from the source they refer to.

Thankfully there is a solution to this problem: version control systems. They keep all versions available to the world and make editing fully transparent.

I keep the source of my website at https://gitlab.com/ambrevar/ambrevar.gitlab.io, in a public Git repository.

I cannot stress enough the importance of keeping your projects under version control in a publicly readable repository: