computer ate my post!

Rosemary

Dammit!

It was brilliant! Smart, funny, insightful. A commentary on modern society, and how the future is unevenly distributed, with a side comment on feminism and a quote from Janis Joplin (“Women are the waitresses at the banquet of life.”)

Then, when I hit “publish”, the computer went: “Post? What post? There was a post?”

Gone, all gone.

Why? Because: started the post yesterday. Brought it up today to finish it, lost the internet connection, did not realize, and blithely kept writing.

Meanwhile, out in the cloud, the server was going, “Hm, this person has timed out. I shall shut down WordPress now. Yes.”

“Post it!” says I. “Huh?” says my computer. “Oh, you were working on something? ”

“Maybe you should, like, sign in,” says WordPress. “That would be good.”

“Ack,” says I.

Now: out of time, must rush to the DayJob.

I’ll try to reconstruct, but you know, it’s never the same the second time around.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 26th, 2011 at 7:33 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

5 Responses to “computer ate my post!”

  • Nonesuch Says:
    April 26th, 2011 at 11:05 am

    Sorry for your loss. You have, however, already managed to faithfully reconstruct the Pennsylvania Dutch syntax I recall so fondly:
    “Brought it today up to finish it…”

  • Inquisitive Raven Says:
    April 26th, 2011 at 4:16 pm

    May I recommend writing future posts in a basic text editor like Wordpad or Notepad++? You can then copy/paste the finished article into the WordPress editor and add highlighting and media, as needed. Heck, with an rtf editor, you might be to do that in the editor. Or look around and see if there’s an external editor specifically for WordPress à la Semagic for LiveJournal. The idea here is to have a local copy just in case.

    • Rosemary Says:
      April 26th, 2011 at 5:17 pm

      Inquisitive Raven —

      I could do that… and have done, for lengthy posts, like the Jack Hardy reminiscence. Things that I know will take several days.

      But for short posts, just not worth it. I just go in, do the deed, and get out.

      It’s my own fault for not hitting SAVE DRAFT more often, and for foolishly assuming that after I left the computer for hours on end WordPress would still be there patiently waiting for me.

      Seriously, I do know better. I was in a rush, and didn’t think.

      PS: the distress evident in my post? That was for humorous effect. I am amused, not upset.

  • Michael Grosberg Says:
    April 28th, 2011 at 10:53 am

    It happens to me all the time, but for some reason, I never thought of looking for a solution until this very moment. apparently there’s more than one Firefox Add-on that saves form and text field data, and the most popular seems to be this:
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lazarus-form-recovery/

    (By the way, I tested it on this very message and it works)