Mercurial requires no central repository. It is peer to peer, and can
be worked on offline, and then merged later into an existing archive.
Directions on how to work with the MIT archive are available in the
class archive.
People get into trouble when they have multiple "heads" in their working archives. Always make sure to merge heads, else you end up with parallel archives. Look for the teal font at the bottom of the tutorial made by Kenny for the sequence of mercurial commands to merge multiple heads.
Think Friar Duck when issuing commands in Mercurial - "Ho Ha Guard Turn Parry Dodge Spin Ha Thrust" - be mindful of the sequence of commands in your local working copy of the archive as in "Pull Update Merge Add Commit Push Heads Merge Update Commit"
Short History
RCS - One file
CVS -Groups of files (now subversion)
Subversion - based on a central server
GIT - What Linus Torvald used to build Linux kernel
Bazaar - What ubuntu developers use
Open Office - has presentation software GUI, so you can do web pages by dragging around a mouse
Sea Monkey is also an open source web development platform.
Dreamweaver is popular and well documented, but you have to buy it
You will have the most flexibility if you write your pages in html. You probably do not need to have a database management system either, this is not really needed until your site gets quite large. Just let your program of choice sit on flat files.
Try not to become a spam vector, if your site gets hijacked. Be mindful of security
Basically, Neil gives an overview as to how to manage your time, and the approaches you should take to get things done within that time frame. He recommends a book that you could read in your free time, that is reflective of the concepts he is presenting
The points summarized in Wikipedia on the Mythical Man Month are quite revealing. I have been inspired to actually buy a copy on eBay for $5.38 (which includes free shipping).
One of the issues I encounter when trying to get things to work in the fab lab, is that the bulk of my time is spent tracking down software and hardware communication issues. One can generate a nicely rendered file in a program like Inkscape, but run into a variety of problems when one attempts to output that file to one of the machines (in our lab, the most popular being the Epilog 50W Lasercutter). I usually start by "Googling" the problem - the Internet often yields a number of clues that one may pursue. Unfortunately, this approach can lead one to barking up a lot of trees, which may or may not contain any squirels. Although this approach may be productive, it can also be a major time waster. A better solution is to find someone who has made it work before, and have them demonstrate how its done. At the moment however, there are more folks who don't know than who do.
Which leads to the need to adequately document what has worked, and make these procedures easily available to fab lab users. Since it is unlikely that the population of people who know something will keep up with the population of people who know even less, the availability of self guided study examples is the only way I see to grow the capabilities of a fab lab.
Our lab is volunteer operated, and is still very much in the "ramp up" phase. There is a group of volunteers which shows up on a regular basis during our open lab times, and makes every effort to introduce new "walk ins" to the workings of the fab lab. Of course, this reduces time an experienced volunteer can spend becoming more "expert" in her endeavours. This is suspiciously similar to Brooks Law , which more or less states 1) that the more people get involved in a project, the more time will be spent in bringing them up to speed, hence slowing everything down and 2) "the number of different communication channels increases along with the square of the number of people (doubling the number of people results in four times as many different conversations)". In other words, there can be a lot of background noise and interruptions, which in the worst case leads to making small gains for time invested.