For the past several years, I've managed my web site content using a local copy (of everything) on my home machine, and a simple rsync script that transfers changed files up to my web site host. While this works, it's limited (there's only one "source" copy of my content) and fragile (if I need to change something on the server, I need to remember to make a local copy before syncing again).

I've always known it would be better to manage the content using a real source control system. When I first started managing my web site like this, the state of the art in source control was Subversion, but I never got around to actually setting it up. Today, my source control system of choice is Git, and it seems like a natural fit.

Importing all my content into a new repository is easy, and I pushed up the repository to my web host overnight. The compressed repo size is 2.6 GB and Git handles it just fine. It feels much better to have multiple mirror copies of the site content, and it's much nicer to be able to manage it using a powerful tool like Git.