Frequently updated web documents
Created on 2021-03-19 by Emin Gabrielyan
Here is the protocol for the publication of simple documents that can be frequently updated.
Table of Contents
A technical detail when copying html files
The sequentially rule
Name all your files with sequential numbers, 1, 2, 3 up to infinity.
This concerns the document itself (the document that is being published) and all the files that may accompany the document (such as excel files, text files, and anything else that you will ever need to add into your folder and link to from your published document).
Number your files in the order of addition.
For example, 1.docx, 2.xlsx, 3.txt. Whatever is the order in which you added the files. Do not care of anything else except the sequential order. No rule here, except that you sequentially number your files in the order of their creation.
Both these examples, 1.docx, 2.xlsx, 3.txt and 1.xlsx, 2.txt, 3.docx are valid. So far it is simple, and it will stay simple until the end of the protocol.
So, one of the files is your doc that will be the current main page (until another, newer doc file will be created).
This file will point to some other files in the document.
No changing of the past
The 2nd rule in this protocol is that once you added a file, you do not touch it, more precisely you do not rename it as some files may already point to it.
Rather you must add new files and create new versions so the past can be easily tracked back.
If you want to create a new version of the doc, you simply create a new file with a new sequential number. You can, for example, have file 6.docx, that is an evolution of the initial document, the first version of which was for example in 3.docx.
File 6.docx can still have the same hyperlinks to files 1.txt and 2.xlsx that were used in 3.docx.
Or you can have more hyperlinks, or you can have less hyperlinks, or you can have hyperlinks to other files, or you can decide that in the new version of the document you better use a corrected version of 2.xlsx saved now under 5.xlsx.
In this way, all your previous documents work as they worked before and point to the files they were pointing before. The corrections modify only the new versions of the documents and leave the old versions as they were before (including the old versions of the files they were pointing to).
If you want to add new files to refer from the doc, just add them with the same numbering principle, 7.txt, and point to it from your last version of the doc (which is 6.docx in this example).
The index of your web page
When you save your doc file additionally in html format (web page filtered), you will create two new items in the folder, 6.html and 6_files.
Similarly, you will have these items for all previously published documents.
Do not touch the previously published documents.
The only thing you must do, is to take the html file you want to use as your main page and copy it into index.html without modifying anything else in your folder.
So, the rule is that index.html is always a copy of the last doc you want to show on the page.
A technical detail when copying html files
Now copying the 6.html into index.html is not one step copy paste, because Windows considers that 6.html is entangled with its folder called 6_files. If you try to copy the file in the same folder with using simply copy and paste commands, you will have this warning.
If you copy 6.html from one folder into another folder, windows will also copy the entangled folder 6_files.
To unentangle, you must first rename 6.html into something else.
When you start renaming 6.html, you will have a warning message like this.
If you click yes, the file will be renamed and will not be entangles anymore with its folder.
The folder itself will not be renamed.
At this point you can copy the file only without its folder.
You must recreate one original copy, which was 6.html,
and the other copy is index.html.
(note that as soon as you create a file with the original file name, 6.html, it will be again coupled with the folder 6_files. This is the way how windows file manager works.)
So now you have the index.html which is just the html copy of your document number 6.docx.
Example
Here is an example how your folder may look like. You have documents 1, 2, 3, and 7 that are published. Normally the last published one, 7.html is copied also to index.htm, which you can see by comparing the date of modification and the size of these two files.
The other files serve as data, and are usually pointed to from one of the published documents.
Take away
The file index.html is always a copy. It can be deleted any time and replaced by another newer version.
Note also, that when you renamed the other copy of the file back to 6.html, it got again re-entangled with its folder 6_files. Now again you cannot simply copy it individually.
Details of windows that must not interest us too much.
In your new version you usually refer to the previous versions, you must always use the links as 5.html and 4.html, and never index.html (because index.html is not reliable as it is just a copy of the last version and can be deleted and replaced any time with another copy).
For all your file names just use sequential names from 1 to infinity.
Do not change the past documents, create instead the new copies.
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