Save me.
About an hour ago I was happily typing away, putting together a typical Michaelish overlong post.
I accidentally hit some bizarre chord of keys, which prompted Blogger to throw up a new and very helpful looking error message - something along the lines of: "Are you sure you want to crap out in the middle of this monster screed? Hit OK to save your post, Cancel to blow away your magnum opus anyway".
"Oh poop," I thought, clicking on that OK button pretty darn sharpish.
I found myself back at the Blogger front screen, flipped back into the blog editor and...
Er...where is it then?
Not in Drafts. Not in Current or even Future posts.
So where the flippy neck is it? What sort of rotten sodding mind game is that?
We've all lost long posts through system crashes or our own stupidity in the past - and not just us Blogger users. But making you think you're not going to lose it, then losing it anyway - that's just mean.
This is a reminder yet again, as if I needed it:
Rule 1: Don't edit in Blogger
Rule 2: Don't edit in Blogger
Rule 3: Don't edit in Blogger
Rule 4: Don't edit in Blogger
Rule 5: Don't edit in Blogger
Rule 6: There is noooo....rule 6
Rule 7: DON'T edit in Blogger
Rule 8: And so on...
I usually write up posts in Word, then C&P them into the Blogger UI. It's a pain in the neck, but saves much tearing of hair, gnashing of teeth, and behaviour of that ilk.
Sometimes I forget. The great thing about the new Blogger is that now I can forget, screw up, be reassured that I'm going to be OK, get screwed anyway, and think seriously about alternative blogging tools yet again.
Nice UI there, guys.
Which reminds me. It's just as easy to blow away your entire draft of the Great American Novel in Word as it is in Blogger - Word only feels more robust. But harking back to a conversation with David Weinberger back at the Jupiter gig - why the hell do we still need to "Save" stuff anyway? What kind of antiquated Disk Operating System tosh is this?
My Palm never needs me to Save stuff: switch on, write, switch off – it’s still all there in the flash memory.
In fact, I’ve even had occasion (unplanned) to run an extreme test on the Palm: switch on, write stuff, drop the fecker in the bog, nicely cracking the screen as it rattles off the porcelain, wait 24 hours for it to dry out, try hot-synching – it’s all still there.
So why does an immensely more powerful and sophisticated piece of kit like my StinkPad still need to Save all the darn time?
I type fast (albeit clumsily), and I’m usually ultra-paranoid about losing stuff. The default auto-save of every 10 minutes or so is just stupid – I can rattle out a couple of pages in 10 minutes, for goodness sake. I have Word set to auto-save every minute. But why is this even necessary?
Hard drives are big enough and fast enough nowadays that this simply isn’t a problem – there's no noticeable performance lag as it saves stuff off in the background. But why isn’t everything just being written away automatically to some honking great stack of flash memory on my laptop even as I create? Or even to the hard drive, if you must - I don't care. Except for the fact that hard drives also seem to be one of the dumber relics of the big iron world we continue to cling to for no good reason.
With the exception of the keyboard, the disk drives (hard, floppy, and DVD) are the only moving parts in this beast and, therefore, presumably more susceptible to wear and tear than things like the screen, parallel port, etc.
This tiny little disk, spinning like a nutter in its rugged little shell, read/write head bobbing nanometers above the surface – it just seems such a delicate, unnecessary anachronism, prone to all sorts of nasty things like 'head slap'.
Head slap. There’s an aptly named phenomenon. Sounds just like what I want to do every time I lose something important in an app that doesn’t have a high frequency of auto saves.
There must be some smart people in labs out there somewhere working to fix this – even for web-based client apps like Blogger. Please?
Of course, this is not a problem the Son of Man ever had to deal with. Because, as we all know, Jesus Saves…
Oh yeah, I was going to bed wasn't I?
Ahem.
I accidentally hit some bizarre chord of keys, which prompted Blogger to throw up a new and very helpful looking error message - something along the lines of: "Are you sure you want to crap out in the middle of this monster screed? Hit OK to save your post, Cancel to blow away your magnum opus anyway".
"Oh poop," I thought, clicking on that OK button pretty darn sharpish.
I found myself back at the Blogger front screen, flipped back into the blog editor and...
Er...where is it then?
Not in Drafts. Not in Current or even Future posts.
So where the flippy neck is it? What sort of rotten sodding mind game is that?
We've all lost long posts through system crashes or our own stupidity in the past - and not just us Blogger users. But making you think you're not going to lose it, then losing it anyway - that's just mean.
This is a reminder yet again, as if I needed it:
Rule 1: Don't edit in Blogger
Rule 2: Don't edit in Blogger
Rule 3: Don't edit in Blogger
Rule 4: Don't edit in Blogger
Rule 5: Don't edit in Blogger
Rule 6: There is noooo....rule 6
Rule 7: DON'T edit in Blogger
Rule 8: And so on...
I usually write up posts in Word, then C&P them into the Blogger UI. It's a pain in the neck, but saves much tearing of hair, gnashing of teeth, and behaviour of that ilk.
Sometimes I forget. The great thing about the new Blogger is that now I can forget, screw up, be reassured that I'm going to be OK, get screwed anyway, and think seriously about alternative blogging tools yet again.
Nice UI there, guys.
Which reminds me. It's just as easy to blow away your entire draft of the Great American Novel in Word as it is in Blogger - Word only feels more robust. But harking back to a conversation with David Weinberger back at the Jupiter gig - why the hell do we still need to "Save" stuff anyway? What kind of antiquated Disk Operating System tosh is this?
My Palm never needs me to Save stuff: switch on, write, switch off – it’s still all there in the flash memory.
In fact, I’ve even had occasion (unplanned) to run an extreme test on the Palm: switch on, write stuff, drop the fecker in the bog, nicely cracking the screen as it rattles off the porcelain, wait 24 hours for it to dry out, try hot-synching – it’s all still there.
So why does an immensely more powerful and sophisticated piece of kit like my StinkPad still need to Save all the darn time?
I type fast (albeit clumsily), and I’m usually ultra-paranoid about losing stuff. The default auto-save of every 10 minutes or so is just stupid – I can rattle out a couple of pages in 10 minutes, for goodness sake. I have Word set to auto-save every minute. But why is this even necessary?
Hard drives are big enough and fast enough nowadays that this simply isn’t a problem – there's no noticeable performance lag as it saves stuff off in the background. But why isn’t everything just being written away automatically to some honking great stack of flash memory on my laptop even as I create? Or even to the hard drive, if you must - I don't care. Except for the fact that hard drives also seem to be one of the dumber relics of the big iron world we continue to cling to for no good reason.
With the exception of the keyboard, the disk drives (hard, floppy, and DVD) are the only moving parts in this beast and, therefore, presumably more susceptible to wear and tear than things like the screen, parallel port, etc.
This tiny little disk, spinning like a nutter in its rugged little shell, read/write head bobbing nanometers above the surface – it just seems such a delicate, unnecessary anachronism, prone to all sorts of nasty things like 'head slap'.
Head slap. There’s an aptly named phenomenon. Sounds just like what I want to do every time I lose something important in an app that doesn’t have a high frequency of auto saves.
There must be some smart people in labs out there somewhere working to fix this – even for web-based client apps like Blogger. Please?
Of course, this is not a problem the Son of Man ever had to deal with. Because, as we all know, Jesus Saves…
Oh yeah, I was going to bed wasn't I?
Ahem.
