what are these tags?

I manage the content on this site with CVS, the Concurrent Versions System. It helps a great deal to be able to have a 'development' website, and a 'live' website - something that is tricky to do shunting .tgz files around the place.

The CVS repository is on one of my servers and I have at least one checked-out copy on my machine at home. I edit the checked-out copy, then commit changed files back to the repository with a suitable 'edit note'. Once I'm happy with the site, I ssh to my webserver, and check-out again, which makes the site live.

Plain CVS isn't encrypted nor authenticated by much more than a hashed password, so I use CVS over ssh. It eliminates the need to run a CVS daemon on the repository server, moving one step closer to a really secure server.