I use RapidWeaver, affectionally called RW by devotees, is a sort of miniature content management system. I use it for this site, and almost all my web work these days. The application runs under MacOS, and is a great value. But like most software, it can fail the user on occasion. Unlike other software, however, RW displays a certain grace under pressure.

I had the Stylus and Slate site working like a charm. But then, for unexplained reasons, the RW site quit showing my work with the full CSS applied. This meant that the content was still there, but the "dressing," like the header, sidebar, and footer were not being positioned or filled out with their respective colors or graphics. I tried the customary fixes in RW: cleansing cache, saving as with a new name, checking the export setting. But nothing worked. I went to the always friendly RW forum, but could not find answers to my unusual problem. Such was my unhappy situation.

So, I hit upon the idea of building an "empty clone" into which I would try to copy/paste the content from the malfunctioning file. I made a quick test to make sure that the CSS anomalies were only affecting the one file (and that was confirmed). So I quickly made an empty clone file. I started copying material into it. It worked beautifully.

Then, in an "I wonder if" moment, I tried to drag an entire page (identified in RW as hierarchical list item) from the malfunctioning file into the clone. And, amazingly it dragged in! Then I previewed this action and discovered to my great joy that the cloned version was "healed" and had easily adopted the correct CSS settings.

This is practically a miracle. Or to be more accurate, a miraculous-like event, since I'm resistant to mythic beliefs. But it sure makes me feel satisfied with the RW product. Not just well designed and well built, but genuinely useful as an improvisational tool when fixes are required.