Hi!
I have lots of repositories locally and on my servers, but I follow even more repositories and I contribute to some here and there. That's why I've the need to stay notified when there is a change. But I don't want to actively follow through RSS or E-Mail. A commit notification isn't worth bloating my inbox even more.
For those who don't know, there is a cool way to keep notified of commits etc. and to exchange messages. You can use IRC in combination with a git hook through cia.vc/ or github.com/ itself, even bitbucket.org supports it now. Otherwise just setup an eggdrop, supybot or the phergie IRC Bot and write a script for it. You can share it here if you want.
It's obvious that a snapshot of your application only makes sense when you also add a database snapshot to it. That's why I'll explain howto create a git hook to take database dumps on each commit or tag.
Go to the hidden .git folder in your project, then a sub folder in there called hooks