Flashes of Panic

Professor γ, like most other CS professors, takes a tiny bit of pride in being able to manage her own course website. She hasn’t gone to the extreme of creating her own proto-CMS, as some professors do, but nor has she admitted that maybe there are some tools out there which would make this task easier.

Notably, while the course website changes with some regularity, there’s no way for students to be aware of the changes, short of visiting the pages on a regular basis. They’ve mentioned this to me—in fact, someone specifically requested a feed.

Fortunately, Professor γ is also a fan of RCS, the grandfather of all revision control systems and the foundation of the widely used CVS. RCS includes a tool called rlog which produces a revision history of a page, including revision notes if they were included at check-in time. It only took me two evenings to come up with a Perl script which would pipe rlog output into an Atom feed. Minimum work-flow friction.

In the event that this sort of thing is useful to anyone else, I’ve posted it for general use. Any Perl hackers interested in improving my code are welcomed.

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