I wanted to see what a sentence used to be

I wanted to see which sentence in an article had changed last.

A CMS is good at published-or-draft. It is worse at last Tuesday’s wording. I write in an editor. Files can be compared. Comparison still shows the old line, and who moved it. For me that already beats a handsome box in a browser tab.

So the essays live in the repo. One Chinese file, one English, same address. Clumsy. The clumsiness is the point: build, feeds, share cards, search — they all drink from the same pile. Change a piece and you are not chasing a title through a second system.

Trouble comes with the house. Leave the date in the header unquoted and it may be read as a timezone-bearing instant, then slip a day on screen. Chinese and English are not read at the same speed; an English-only clock lies about the Chinese side. Bold in Chinese once printed the asterisks onto the page, as if the essay were arguing with itself.

None of that looks like a feature. It appears when you actually write, and write in two languages. I spent longer patching those seams than I spent making the first article render.

People ask why I do not hand the pile to a content system. I need code blocks to wear this site’s colors. I need the site’s own components inside a piece. I need to edit offline. Taken together, I would rather keep the manuscript. The bill is that every edge is mine. Miss one and the build stops — or worse, does not stop, and quietly shows the wrong day.

The filenames have already grown into other rooms. Folders would be tidier. Feeds, maps, old links still know this scheme. Moving would cost more than the little grimace I make when I see the names. I let the grimace stay.

Sometimes the structure you can ship is the right one for now. I still want to see a line after it has been changed. As long as that remains, I am calm leaving the writing in files.