No matter how hard you try, no matter how technichally
oriented you are, some times you are going to do some really stupid things. One
of them is the proper use of Save and Save As. Let me break it down for you.
Whenever I do one of these entries I always open the last one I did and start
typing over it. Why? I really have no idea why I take this specific route. I
could always just start with a completely blank page. When I open an existing
one though it already has part of the naming convention, the appropriate file
extension, all that jazz. Either it means I appreciate the effinciency of it all
or I am a really lazy man.
That being said there is only one way to use this approach safely and without
compromising your data. That proper method is to instantly save the file you
opened up with the intended final file name once your work is done. That way
when you finally are done you can just hit Save and everything is
golden.
If, however, you do not take this approach you risk doing exactly what I
have done which is to start working on something and then hit Save instead of
Save As. By doing so you have now saved one file over the other and you risk
losing all you have done before. All these years that I’ve been working on the
web and I still make this very basic and simple mistake.
This also wouldn’t be too large of a tradgedy if I would just edit web files
the way a good and safe person does. In a safe and sane world one would work off
of a local copy of the web site they were making a change to and then when you
are done you would upload the changes so as not to compromise the copy up on the
web. This would also allow you to test functionallity locally and you would not
risk putting up something that would potentially break the site or just have bad
links.
I, once again, have to make my life more complex by living under a guise of
convenience. I like to use HTML editors that allow me to actually work on the
files that are up on the server. I know that I’m not really working on the file
itself. I’m working on a copy of the file that has been downloaded as a
temporary file to my computer and when I save it the file is actually ftp’d back
up to the web server. This seems to cut out a step for me so I continue to do
it… even though I occasionally make a mistake as I have done now.
What does this all mean? It means that I was doing the entry for the seventh
while working in the file for the fifth as my template and in turn I completely
got rid of whatever I was babbling on this Thursday, July 5 entry.
I hope this might have brought some enlightenment into your life. It really
is here only because I screwed up and decided to write about it.
-WW