KOK Edit: Your favorite copyeditor since 1984(SM)
KOK Edit: your favorite copyeditor since 1984(SM) KOK Edit: your favorite copyeditor since 1984(SM) Katharine O'Moore Klopf
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Monday, November 26, 2012

Fixing the "Editing Tools" Page of the Copyeditors' Knowledge Base

Argh and double argh!

It seems that 12 days ago, I unknowingly mangled the "Editing Tools" page of the Copyeditors' Knowledge Base (CKB). I've now restored the page the best that I could, but some entries that were once on that page may not be there now. If those of you who love and use the CKB gleaned some links from the "Editing Tools" page that you don't see there now, I would be fawningly grateful if you would e-mail those links to me at editor@kokedit.com.

Here's the technical explanation of how this mess occurred:

Whenever I add links to any page in the CKB, I do so within the page's PHP file online, via the file-editing interface of my web host. Then I always immediately close out the web-host interface and FTP into my web site's files via CuteFTP to back up any changed files onto my computer.

I've figured out what I must have done to mess things up with the "Editing Tools" page: While editing the file online, I went to a spot about halfway down the page, selected what I intended to be only a few lines, and deleted them. But apparently, I did not realize at the time that I selected the entire final half (!) of the code and text—not just a few lines—from the file before I saved it. So of course when I backed up the newly saved file onto my computer, what I backed up was the page that was now missing its bottom half.

Because I'm very strict with myself about backing up my web-site files onto my computer immediately after editing them, I did not have the earlier version on my computer to upload online. (In other words, the backup file that was on my computer was missing its bottom half, just like the "Editing Tools" page on my web site). I did, however, have a version of the page from 2011 when my web site was in HTML instead of PHP. So I copied the bottom half of the code and text from the old SHTML file and pasted it into the current PHP file, and then made adjustments where needed.







4 comments:

blogmum said...

How annoying for you Katherine -- glad to hear you could get most of it back without too much hassle. Your tweet prompted me to have another look at the page -- it's a great resource, and I realised that the “Guide to Scientific Writing: Top 10 Tips for Responding to Reviewer and Editor Comments” was exactly what I need right now as I'm working with an author to respond to a picky reviewer.
Thanks, Hilary

Katharine O'Moore-Klopf said...

In case anyone is wondering: Well before writing this blog post, I checked the Internet Wayback Machine, which told me it hadn't cached the "Editing Tools" page.

But Google had cached a fairly recent version of the page. Thanks to a colleague to alerted me to that, I copied and saved the source code for the cached page before it disappeared, so I can now compare it to the current restored version of the page.

Whew!

Katharine O'Moore-Klopf said...

But still, a few links may have slipped through, so if you know of any that did, I'd be happy to get an e-mail from you.

Katharine O'Moore-Klopf said...

Hilary, I'm so glad to hear that you find the "Editing Tools" page helpful in your current project.

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