Beware the Ides of March
No, I’m not Caesar. But I should have listened anyway.
This was going to be a 2-post day. Actually, it is a 2-post day, since I’m writing this one. But it was going to be a different 2-post day.
I had just finished writing a rather lengthy post expanding on some further points about the fathers’ rights issue, when the entire thing disappeared down the cyberhole due to some unintentional slippery fingers on my part. Disappeared, never to return, unless I laboriously try to recreate it later today. Which I may do; but right now I have other obligations to tend to.
I’ve told myself time and again to save posts as I write, and often I do. But periodically I forget, and this time I paid the price. And I can’t even blame that always-appealing target, Blogger. I have no one to blame but myself. Drat.
In my now ancient book of 1997, RULES OF THE NET: Online Operating Instructions for Human Being, there is a long section entitled:
“Those who do not save keystrokes are doomed to repeat them.”
I often do compose in something other than Blogger, and I often do save as I go along, even in Blogger. But every now and then (probably when in a hurry) I just plain forget. That’s what happened here.
I’ve tried that “recover post” function in the past, and it hasn’t worked unless I’ve saved a previous version. So I didn’t think to even try it this time. But I will if there’s ever a next time.
I blame W.
I agree with dicentra and camojack. For a substantive post, use Notepad (or its betters, Metapad or TextPad), then copy/paste into Blogger.
I often compose my stuff in “Notepad”, but I’m none too loquacious anyhow…
I use mozzila, so I don’t know how you can delete the whole thing by one key press. Since even if I hit the back key, mozzilla warns me that i might lose data. Still, I did click it and lost a post that way, because I wasn’t paying attention.
The other option is to compose the post in Notepad or Word or whatever and save it that way. CTRL+S is pretty easy to do often.
Something about composing directly onto a Web page seems to invite losing the thing.
I have lost two exceedingly brilliant posts to just such finger slips (though I cannot completely discount the possibility of malevolent machine behavior) and I used GoBack to revert my computer to five minutes earlier. I was actually able to recover one of the posts from a cached copy. Unfortunately, upon recovery it had been changed in such a way that it was no longer quite such a brilliant piece of writing, (that darned malevolent computer again) but at least I was able to post it; the other post was gone, never to be seen again…
It actually saves what you type as you type. And it recovers the last save if your page is a complete blank.
If you type something after the last time you typed, then no, it wouldn’t work since the new save overrites the old one. Nor would it work if you backspaced a portion of your post or did any other kind of editing after you lost it. Since that might trigger the save on a blank page.
Type something in the composition page. Exit out of the page, come back to it, hit the key, and it should recover. Unless some browser incompatibility occurs.
I tried that “recover post” button once myself in hopes of rescuing a similar slippery-fingered loss of text, but it didn’t work. I think it just takes you back to a previously-saved version of the post, if you happened to save a previous version of the post. If you didn’t, I am pretty sure you’re out of luck. My sympathies, Neo!
Did you try that “recover post” button in the blogger composition interface?