The Computer Ate My Blog Entry – God of the Machine
May 242003
 

You’re kidding, right? This is actually lamer than “The dog ate my homework”: there was an antediluvian era when you couldn’t save your homework to your hard drive. Yet Colby Cosh, Mr. Hand Coding, has trotted out this excuse twice in two weeks, while Andrea Harris can figure out how to change her site design every six hours but seems to have her posts swallowed with some regularity.

I concede that I’m not in the greatest position to hand out technical advice, but people, this is not difficult. Do not write blog entries directly into your blogging software. Open some svelte text editor, like Notepad, Wordpad, or BBEdit if you want to get fancy (Microsoft Word is not svelte), give your post a title, and save it. Begin writing, hitting Ctrl-S or the little floppy disk icon — see it up there on the toolbar? — after every paragraph or so. If you can’t manage HTML outside of your blogging software, then just copy the links you need to the bottom of the post. When you’re finished, open your blogging software, select your post, and copy it in. Add your links if you haven’t already. Post. Repeat as necessary.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled precious art blogging.

(Update: Craig Henry comments.)

  8 Responses to “The Computer Ate My Blog Entry”

  1. I hand code. I think I’ve lost one entry, through stupidity, which I later re-wrote.

    Saving is not that hard.

  2. Aaron wrote: "Do not write blog entries directly into your blogging software. Open some svelte text editor, like Notepad, Wordpad, or BBEdit if you want to get fancy…."

    What he said.

    ACD

  3. Once, while grading student essay exams, my dog ate a student’s paper, or, at least, enough of it to make the final grade a bit iffy.

  4. I’m impressed that your dog ate an exam, but even more impressed that he can grade them.

  5. This is the main reason I’m not using Blogger or Moveable Type or some such thing–I want to retain all of the entries on my local computer and rebuild the blog pages from them automatically. It takes a bit a scripting, but heck, I’m a programmer by trade.

    I’d like to have a comments feature, though…have to think about that.

  6. I don’t know about Blogger, but in MT or Greymatter it’s pretty easy to export your blog entries into a file that you can then use to rebuild them. Scripting the process wouldn’t be too tough; probably less work than what you’re doing now.

  7. Good Lord. Who enters their work directly into the blog software??

    Comments, yes. Entries, no. It is way too easy to lose/accidentally post/lose when your remote server crashes and burns, turning all your beautiful posts into alphabyte soup.

  8. Blogging software? My blogging software is Notepad, you absurd man–Notepad, and a freeware FTP client. Sometimes I just write three or four paragraphs without saving, instead of one, and I lose work as a consequence when the browser or some such app goes on the fritz. Anyone could have a patch of bad luck in this regard. (And incidentally, Ctrl-S doesn’t save your work within Notepad; you have to pull down the File menu and choose ‘Save’, which is a constant, though small, hindrance to the habit of frequent saving.)

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