Tonight has been a bad night. For the third time in 2 months, I have had an article ruined by Blogger.
I had spent a couple of hours writing. Since I am aware that sometimes things go wrong, I often press the button "Save as Draft" to ensure that it is saved.
So I'm writing away. It's a passionate article. I am putting lots of emotion into what I am writing. I am even at the point of tears at one point.
Then my wife comes in. She wants me to scratch her itchy back for a while as she watches TV. I have come to the end of the emotional bit in my writing so I decide that I need a short break. I hit "Save as Draft" and go out to scratch the wife's back.
Ten minutes later I come back. Something is wrong. "The blog you were looking for was not found" says the blogger page, with a button that says "back to the dashboard".
I go cold. Surely not this article I scream inside. I go to the dashboard, I go to the edit page which shows the articles still in draft form. I hit the button for the one I'm working on...
It's the draft version I saved previously - not the latest one.
All the emotional stuff - about 150-200 words - is gone. Everything up to that point is still there, but the real gutsy stuff is gone. I hit the back button on my browser - but the work is still gone.
I am really angry at Blogger for this. It is just not good enough for bloggers to lose their work because of some crappy software glitch, or whatever it is. It shouldn't be bandwith because I have broadband.
I have, one or twice, used a text editor for writing an article. But the advantage of writing in the browser is that I can switch between tabs (I use Firefox) to go to references which I can then give links to as I write. I suppose I can always just copy and paste the text in the editing window into a text editor as I go - but it is still a royal pain.
The annoying thing is that the two other articles that got blown out of the water (due to the same phenomenon) ended up not being published anyway. The article that got ruined tonight was different in the emotions that I was experiencing - which will make the article just that much harder to rewrite.
Grrrrrrrrr!
2 comments:
Typepad. For a few bucks a month, you get peace of mind.
Easy solution:
Write your stuff offline in a cheap or freeware html or text editor (or even MSWord), then cut and paste it into Blogger when you're finished.
That's especially vital when 1) you're writing long posts; and 2) you're posting from a continent that's different from the one where the Blogger software resides, thus multiplying the risks of a timeout or communications gitch by a factor of ten.
I don't even like composing comments in the on-line editor, because there's probably a 1 in 25 chance that something will go wrong, and the longer your comment the higher the risk. So before hitting "Login and publish," I always do a "select all" and hit control-c, so that if my work is lost in transit, I at least have it in my clipboard.
Live and learn. But I definitely feel your pain.
Here's the difference between you and me, though. If I write something in the heat of passion, I always save it for at least an hour and re-edit it before sending. If I lost something I wrote in a pique of emotion, I'd view it as an act of Providence graciously meant to save me from posting something that would probably have got me in trouble anyway.
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