steps for publishing & reverse-publishing IdeaXchg

(Author's note: this page is obsolete, but it has been retained for further review and processing.  Some broken links to deleted elements may still be present on this page.  See IdeaXchg Development Tasks for current notes and references.)

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IdeaXchg contains multiple discussion areas, edited content (articles and topical contents outlines) plus structural pages, all combined into a single public web in order to get the maximum benefit of FrontPage 2000's indexing and link maintenance facilities.  Because some changes originate on my local development machine, and some changes originate from the web (i.e. discussion messages), there is a real danger of accidental screwups when I attempt to synchronize my development machine with the live www.ideaxchg.com web.  The purpose of this article is to spell out guidelines for safely publishing the IdeaXchg web in both directions.

What it means to synchronize

At any point in time, I may want to bring my "local" web (running under PWS on my Windows 95 machine) into synchronization with the "live" web (www.ideaxchg.com running on a Windows NT/IIS server).  My local web may have almost any kind of changes not previously published to the live web, with the exception of new postings to an active discussion area.  The live web should only have changed in its discussion areas (assuming for now that no one else has direct authoring privileges on the IdeaXchg web).  The desired result of synchronization is that all of my local updates are applied to the live web, and all of the new live discussion is carried over to my local web.

Partial synchronization - uploading local changes to live web

In order to apply my local changes to the live web, I use FrontPage's Publish Web command against my local web, specifying http://www.ideaxchg.com as the target location.  The important point to be careful about in this step is that I don't want to accidentally clobber any of the live discussions when I'm publishing in this direction (uploading changes).  In order to be safe I take the following precautions:

• local postings should never made to an active discussion area
  The Test Discussion is the only permissible exception (i.e. where local postings are allowed), and this requires some additional measures to keep it working properly on both local and live webs. Should a local posting be made to one of the live discussions, e.g. by accident, be sure to take similar additional measures (as those for the Test Discussion) before publishing, or else the live discussion may be damaged publishing.
  
  
• suppress uploading of local Test Discussion files
  (Likewise for any other discussion areas to which local postings or tocproto.htm edits have been made, which are unusual circumstances.)  In order to avoid rendering the Test Discussion inoperable, we mustn't allow FrontPage to intermingle the local version and the live web version of a single discussion.  So one version or the other must be sacrificed, which is no big deal for the expendable Test Discussion.  Generally I would opt to leave the live web version intact, so I follow this procedure:
  • delete all local test discussion messages and tocproto.htm via FP Explorer
    These are the files in the disc1 folder.  Deleting the messages assures that I won't accidentally overwrite a message with the same name on the live server.  (Otherwise, all of the individual messages had better be marked as Excluded from publishing, which is not the default.)  Deleting the tocproto.htm may not be essential, but it seems like a good idea to let the next step create a nice, fresh, clean one.
  • run FP's Recalculate Hyperlinks command
    This will recreate an empty disc1/tocproto.htm file automatically.  (Generally, this command should always be run after deleting discussion messages, I believe.)
  • mark the new tocproto.htm as Excluded from being published
    I.e. in the File Properties dialog, Workgroup tab, check Exclude this file when publishing the rest of the web.  At this point the local test discussion has been zapped into usable, empty state, and it will not overwrite the live Test Discussion when the local web is published.  If the empty tocproto.htm were not marked as Excluded from being published, it would replace the live discussion's tocproto.htm when published, effectively clearing the Threads of the live discussion.
    
    
• select the Publish Changed Pages Only option when publishing to live web
  (Remember that if you use the quick Publish icon on the toolbar, make sure you had the Publish Changed Pages Only checkbox selected when you last published, because this option carries over as the default, and you don't get the dialog with the toolbar shortcut.)  Since the local version of active non-Test discussions should only have been populated by downloading from the live web, uploading these old local versions of discussions should never update the live discussion thread structure.  (But if one were to make an edit to the local tocproto.htm for an active discussion, it would be published unless explicitly flagged as Excluded from publishing.)
  
  
• proceed with download step after uploading, if desired
  It isn't necessary to fully resynchronize unless I want to pick up the latest discussions on my local machine.  But if I want to pick up any portion of the live discussion, I have to pick up all of the discussion changes since my last download.  (Unless I want to mess with non-standard FTP-based procedures.)  Generally I would expect to upload only, and not bother with reverse-publishing to download the very latest discussion except occasionally. 

Partial synchronization - downloading live discussions

The key point to watch out for is not to accidentally lose local changes that haven't yet been published to the live web.  Also I don't want to damage the Test Discussion, which is the one discussion area on which I make postings on my local development machine.  To be safe I follow these steps when reverse-publishing from www.ideaxchg.com to my local web:

• first upload any changes made since last updating the live web
  This minimizes the chances of losing my precious edits, although FP generally seems smart enough to detect and warn before replacing files with older files.  But I'd rather not depend on this, especially because I recall times when I saw no such warnings.  In other words, I'm suggesting that the most cautious procedure is to always upload IdeaXchg before downloading.  This means following the steps outlined in the previous section before proceeding further.
  
  
• select the Publish Changed Pages Only option and publish to local web
  Since the preceding upload entails zapping the Test Discussion as well as carrying all of my latest edits to the live web, the only remaining difference is the discussions, all of which will now published to the local web.  This brings the local and live webs to a fully synchronized state.

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