Recently my sister’s hard drive died and she lost nearly everything. By an unbelievably odd coincidence, she happened to save an electronic copy of her senior essay, which made her very happy. Still, it took her almost a month to figure out where she could find it. I can’t imagine what would have happened had it been during her actual writing it.
Several of my friends had similar scares while writing, and it always baffled me. I had about 9 copies of my senior project at any given time, not to mention a version history of every file I used.
But I’m a nerd. No history major is going to set up a subversion server and repository, or install TortoiseSVN, or do any of the things that I did to set up the environment to work properly.
So…here’s my idea. Write the UI for them. The tools all already exist. You just need to find a repository and work out some details. For example, at Yale we have the Pantheon, which gives us 500 MB of space to use at our discretion. It keeps nighlty backups. It is accesible from all the computer labs. Yet no one uses it. They don’t because it is confusing, and it doesn’t “just work” all by itself. That’s where the UI comes in. All it would need to do was commit changes with a date anytime they saved (or daily, or whatever you want). They wouldn’t hardly need to do anything at all.
I do know about Office Live Workspace, which sort of tries to address this problem. They require an internet connection at all times, and as anyone who has actually written such an essay, sometimes you just can’t get Yale Wireless to work. Or sometimes you need to turn off the internet because it is distracting. Or sometimes you are on an airplane. Anyway, they don’t quite get the job done.
Do not lose an internet connection while you are editing...
If I had any time, I might implement it. But I don’t. You can though.
Also, for CS majors, this is certainly a plausible senior project aka CS 490. Just make it a little more research-y and you are golden.
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