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Lost — 19 Comments

  1. a safety measure I have employed successfully whenever anything of length is written on t'internet is select all and copy, holding it in the clipboard, then hit publish or submit because the connection can and does drop out on occasions taking the rare lucid writing off into the ether…

     

    • That's an awful lot of bother?  I do that kind of thing if I expect things to go wrong, but in the normal course of things, they don't.  Ah fuckit – words are cheap.

  2. I've researched this problem intensively, tested various solutions, and can say without a shadow of a doubt that your cyber loss can be recovered simply by 

  3. I generally type in Word and then copy across – two screw-ups can happen simultaneously but they haven't happen to me ……. yet

    • Word is grand for writing books and things but is a mess when it comes to the Interwebs.  It throws all kinds of shite onto the site [apart from the shite content, that is]. 

      I might start using Live Writer again though.  That keeps copies when it publishes.

      • I suggest writing in Word or similar but then copy/pasting the whole text into MS Notepad (a primitive text editor). This removes all formatting so you can copy/paste that into WordPress while retaining the original text. .

        • Good God!!  That's a hell of a lot of cutting and pasting?  My work isn't worth that.  Anyways, as an ardent Linux user Word and Notepad are on foreign territory.  I suppose I could try Gedit? 😉

          • I use Linux (Mint Cinnamon 17.1) too, and can recommend Geany as a good editor with lots of capabilities. Remember to set up the line-wrap preferences. For a quick-and-dirty, I compose (non-HTML of course) a new email in Thunderbird and cut-n-paste it. It's quick, easy, safe and effective.

              • Nice one indeed. Just installed it and pleased to see it remembers what files you had open last time you exited. Funny how many people are moving to Linux (MC 17.1 here as well) – slowly but surely Microsoft getting pushed aside?

  4. I don't know if it would work when you are writing an original post, but having lost countless brilliant comments when the page refreshes or some other disaster strikes, I found and downloaded Textarea Cache, a bit of free software that automatically saves as you write, so should the gremlins attack mid-comment, I just pull up the little window and retrieve what I've just written. It keeps it for a week, I think. It's a great little piece of kit, and has saved me many a catastrophic surge in blood pressure. As I say, it works for comments, but I'm not sure about original posts. It might be worth a look, though.

    • Many thanks!  It is now installed and working.  It looks like it could be a nice little lifesaver, though I haven't tried it on full posts [yet].

      • nisakiman beat me to it. I've had it installed for over a year, and it's saved me on many occasions. However, it doesn't always grab what you've typed – and, sods law, WordPress sites seem to be the worst culprits. It's saving this as I type, but there are some bloggers using WP in various forms where I find no record of comments when I click on the drop-down list afterwards. I actually use it to remind me what I've posted, and where, and this is how I spotted the problem. Having said that, if it works in your blog editor you should be OK for recovering anything missing. There are options for setting how long it stores things, and it also keeps images – I can see a complete save of Friday Funnies, for instance. I know many people recommend composing in a text editor first, but as noted above, this often causes all sorts of formatting errors.

        • I have just tried it out in anger [a longish post] and it not only stored what I have written but also all the subsequent edits.  I am really impressed!

          I was going to start using Windows Live Writer again, but seeing as I run Linux it would have meant firing up a VirtualBox every time which is a little tedious.  Textarea Cache seems to be the perfect solution.  Now I sound like an ad!

          •  

            Oh good! I wasn't sure it would work for blog posts, but if it does, then great! As microdave says, it's not infallible, but it has worked most of the time for me. I can't tell you the frustration I used to feel when I wrote a long and involved comment, only to see it disappear into the ether just as I was finishing. How I refrained from attacking my computer I don't know. Now I'm positively sanguine when my comment gets redacted by some webgremlin with a nasty sense of humour.

            Yes, a great little program.

  5. @nisakiman – I've just installed Textarea Cache in Firefox 34 myself and the icon shows up in the Add-on bar by itself when I start typing. Yeah, I know, Firefox 29 and above doesn't have an Add-on bar but I use the Classic Theme Restorer extension that was developed for the new interface (Australis) and it gives it back.

    Anyway, this is going to be a lifesaver for sure. My blood pressure goes off the scale when sites automatically reload a given page and/or comment threads every few minutes (Disqus and WebUpD8, I'm talking to you) or losing a long-ish comment on Google+ because Google+ never ever remembers anything if the page is accidently refreshed…which one can do very easily just by thinking about it.

    Never lost a WordPress post by publishing it though. Sounds like a possible redirection problem?

    • Indeed – a brilliant recommendation.  Sometimes WordPress is slow to publish to the server and when I think it has gone through, it actually hasn't.  I usually have the site open in one tab and the dashboard open in another so I can cross-check, but sometimes I forget. 

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