So I have been thinking I should maybe try and resurrect this whole blogging thing. I have been feeling the urge to write something quite a bit recently, so that is a good sign to start again.

I thought about starting a new blog. In fact I shopped around the free blog services with that intention. I eventually decided to resurrect this one. The other free services did not seem to offer much more than what I have here, and I thought maybe if I started posting here again, then the three people who read it before may come back.

I took a look at Zim; a desktop wiki. In fact it is pretty much the same as Tomboy, only the one compelling difference was that Zim had in built subversion support.

The Subversion support should make it easy to do version control on your notes and potentially have a backup off-site. It would be really nice for things like sharing notes and documentation between people or computers.

The first big issue with this feature is that there is no documentation on how to get this to work. I went through the Zim website and found nothing that was helpful. I ended up having to do some digging around myself. Here is how I got SVN support to work with Zim:

1. First you need to create your subversion repository. Use

svnadmin create

to create your repository.

2. Create your notebook in Zim. Note where you told the files to be saved. Close down Zim completely (not even hanging around in your notification are)

3. In a terminal window, cd to the directory and then run

svn import

to get the initial files in to the repository.

4. Move the original directory out of the way, or delete it if you are feeling brave.

5. Check out the svn repository in to the location where Zim is expecting the files to be.

6. Start up Zim again and open the notebook.

You can now start working away in Zim, writing stuff and saving the changes. IF you create a new page, then it automatically does the svn add stuff for you. You should then pull down the Tools menu periodically and choose the "SVN Commit" option.

If you are nervous that it is not behaving as you expect, you can always check out another working copy and see what it looks like.

Another thing to note is that Zim logs stuff to you .xsession_errors file. tail that file to get