I decide to put this site's directories under revision control so that I can maintain the history of changes with ease. Here are the commands that I used.
First I created a simple subversion repository based on the file system. This one is called 'svn' - which is not too sophisticated...
svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs svn
Then create a trunk directory in this new repository.
svn mkdir file://`pwd`/svn/trunk -m 'Creating trunk'
Then I imported the bin and public_html directories of the site into the new repository.
svn import bin file://`pwd`/svn/trunk/bin -m 'Initial import of bin directory' svn import public_html file://`pwd`/svn/trunk/public_html -m 'Initial import of public_html directory'
Now the bin and public_html directories are in subversion the originals can be moved else where and the svn controlled versions checkout.
mkdir tmp mv bin tmp mv public_html tmp svn checkout file://`pwd`/svn/trunk/bin svn checkout file://`pwd`/svn/trunk/public_html
Now I can work away in the bin and public_html directories and when appropriate commit the changes to subversion with suitable comments so that they can be backed out or learnt from if necessary.