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Various compare tools designed to help businesses and individuals to get valuable information out of two versions of the same document. Software designers use compare utilities to check the code, highlight changes and write version info. Legal professionals use compare tools to analyze changes made within documents. Educators can compare student job against original key, quality assurance specialists use compare and merge tools to learn more about changes.

There are a number of compare tools, some are freeware, other very expensive focused on a very specific task. The key difference between tools is what kind of documents can compare tool handle and in what way.

Today most web tasks are about web-mastering. People need to design web-pages, people need to design templates for their blogs, people need to maintain their home page up-to-date and process various changes. The most important is help that compare tools can provide for php and htm updating and spam fighting. Actually, we face these tasks constantly, as most on-line solutions that we install on our web-sites need to be updated regularly.

There might be several reasons, why it is necessary to update my web-site or php files of my blog. The first, the bad one -- to fight spam. These who run web-site, blog or forum know about spam messages, broken down php scripts and so on. The second reason is regular web-site update.

So what the problem is? Why not just download updated files and install them into the blog? Because, I'm sure, a lot of modifications, updates, patches, tweaks and self-made modifications were processed. When it's time to update blog or forum php list it seems to be tool hard to remember about all changes that were made. Is there a solution? Sure, use any compare and merge tool to find and apply changes that were made.

Follow the simple step-by-step guide. Get the copy of old files with all changes that you have made before. Then get the copy of new files, suggested by author of your blog, forum or cms engine. Then use some compare tool to find changes that were made. If you remember what files you have modified then you can open and compare two versions to each other. Find the changes that you have made and apply them to the newer version. Upload updated files to your web-site.

Another important aspect is controlling the changes that were made by authors of software. Running compare tool for two versions of on-line blog or forum can give you an idea about what changes were made. Does it worth installing update, how will it affect your web-site and so on.

And finally, my favorite application of compare and tools. If you do a lot of modifications then sometime you face the problem, that it stopped working now. Why? I don't know, what I do is moving step back with compare tool and compare version with bug to the version that works properly. Found changes? OK, let's apply the to the version with bug. Wow! It works properly now.

Not that I don't like Notepad or html-editors... I like the filling when I know about what changes I do upload to my web-site. I like to see in what way were php scripts changed, I like to see what changes were made to htm files, I fill comfortable when I can compare version that works properly to the newest version with some bugs. This feeling of control worth few bucks spent on reliable compare tool.