C O O L P A G E H E L P . C O M - The Official Help Website for Cool Page Users

Important

The importance of backing up your Cool Page pages cannot be stressed enough. From time to time we get support mail from users who have lost all of the data on their hard drives due to a virus or some other unplanned accident.

Needless to say, an event such as that can be quite frustrating or even painful if one has forgotten to make backup copies of the important files on the hard drive.

At this time, Cool Page can only open files with the extension .cpg. These are the webpages in Cool Page format. They are not the same as the published webpages on a server that you see in your web browser. The published pages are .html files.

Note -Even though a future version of Cool Page will be able to open .html files, an .html file does not contain all the extended information that is in the Cool Page file (.cpg), such as Undo Redo, Plugin objects configurations, Events configurations, etc. Even if and when Cool Page is able to import (open) .html files, it will still be crucial to backup the .cpg files. Cool Page has special abilities, which HTML does not have. This is one of the many reasons Cool Page is more than "just another HTML editor".

Keeping Your .CPG Files Small

The .cpg files contain all of the information that is on your webpage. They do not contain the actual images or sound files used on the pages but they do include a reference to those files. For that reason it is recommended that images and sounds used also get backed up, as stated above.

Cool Page has a unique Undo-Redo feature. This tool can be used to quickly edit your pages. The Undo-Redo Tool uses the page History. This history of page edits is also contained in the .cpg files. By default, the page History stores all edits *EVER* made to the web page (note: New files initially created in version 2.71 or later, by default only the most recent 100 edits are saved).

This can cause the .cpg to become a huge file, consuming many Mega Bytes (MB) of disk space (and making backup to floppy impractical).

Fortunately, there are 2 easy ways to make these files smaller. Use WinZip to compress the .cpg files, and they will shrink typically by a factor of 100 to 1. Or, use Preferences in Edit menu to reduce the maximum number of edits saved in order to keep the .cpg from growing beyond a certain size of your choosing. Typically 10 - 100 edits will keep the .cpg file small. We do not suggest turning Undo Redo History off entirely. Even though this is allowed, the impact of 10 - 100 edits is negligible on .cpg file size and having the History is helpful.

A future version of Cool Page will automatically compress the .cpg files, so that they will not grow large and it will not be necessary to discard any of this valuable Undo-Redo history.

BackUp HTML Files

It is not really necessary to make backup copies of your html webpages. If you published your pages, the html files are on the web server. Should you lose the pages on the server all you have to do is open each page in Cool Page and republish them.

If you want to back up your pages as html files then use the Export feature in the Cool Page File menu and save them to a floppy or zip disk. Your image and sound files will also get backed up when you do that.

Unreliable Web Hosting

An often overlooked reason to have backup copies of your webpages is that of unreliable webhosts. Some free webhosts "promise the world" and 6 months later they disappear, along with your webpages! They usually do this with no warning to you either. Be somewhat cautious when choosing your webhost and choose a host with a good reputation and a name you can trust.

Put Your Cool Page Program On Another Computer?

Scenario - You have Cool Page installed on your computer. You recently purchased a new computer and you want to install Cool Page on that new computer. If you are a registered user of Cool Page you must go log in at My Purchases and redownload Cool Page. See this guide.

Follow the BACK UP instructions above and move your pages and other files (images and sounds you used) to your new computer.

Remember - Always routinely back up your .cpg's and other needed files. It pays to be a little cautious.

When was the last time you backed up your files?

.CPG's Made with Older Versions of Cool Page

Pages edited in a newer version have additional information stored in them pertaining to new features and backward compatibility is not maintained. This the same for most software programs.

example: Microsoft Word 6 documents can not be opened in older versions of Word.

New features are continually added to Cool Page making it more powerful and easier to use. You may open any .cpg in the newest version of the program. This means that your pages made with version 2.0 can be opened and edited in version 2.6. If the page is then saved, it will contain information related to version 2.6 features and that page can no longer be opened in an older version of Cool Page.

4. Choose SendTo and then click on 3 1/2 Floppy (A)

Your folder with your webpages and files will get copied on the floppy disk. You can use the same procedure to send copies to other media such as a zip disk or a CDR disk.

Important: If the images and files used on your pages are in different directories on your computer, do this:

• Create a new folder on your hard drive.
• Open each page in Cool Page and Save the page to the new folder.
• Next, Export the page to the same new folder.

If ALL files are in the same folder, the .CPG files will "remember" the location of each image or sound file used on the page.