I just deleted a long and massively hyperlinked blog entry about my inability to deal with modern techology (related to missing today’s seminar in Second Life), by closing a browser tab by mistake. I don’t have time to re-write it now, and I won’t get round to doing it again tomorrow.
Please can we have an autosave function for blogs in Nature Network? fuck
MT4 will fix this.
I think the second version is pithier… point made.
@Richard: how?
@SCurry: cheers. That does actually cheer me up. I’m glad I’m so shallow sometimes.
Yesterday I wrote a blog and thought I’d saved it, but hadn’t. Unless it’s something too short to worry about I now tend not to rely on the NN’s
crappyidiosyncratic system and draft the blog as a text file in wordpad or notepad before splurting the lot into NN when I have finished.Macintosh users can use MarsEdit to save draft version of blog posts, and there is certainly similar Windows software available. Writeboard uses the same Textile formatting as Nature Network and is therefore a great online tool for saving draft versions.
Ian – I feel your pain and have
grumbledblogged about this kind of thing myself, on rather too many occasions.However…
I just deleted a long and massively hyperlinked blog entry about my inability to deal with modern techology (related to missing today’s seminar in Second Life), by closing a browser tab by mistake.
Did anyone else appreciate the irony in this?
Sorry, but it is a little amusing… somehow.
[ducks things thrown at him by Ian]
Henry, you might have saved your lost post! There’s a bug, and the saved-but-not-published posts are at the VERY beginning of your blog posts in the “Manage Blog” section (alllll the way back in time.)
I had a similar problem…
The moral of the story is
Ian should be less stupidget MT4save your drafts in a safe place!Ctrl-alt-del! Ctrl-alt-del!
Yes, this sounds a very familiar tale. Been there, done that. I’ve usewd the same strategy of Henry, composing offline initially, but then unless your’re careful all the quote marks get turned into “smart” quotes which screws up the hyperlinks.
Also, you may want to visit here
I was bitten once by this, and I always write offline in a text editor now. The smart quotes thing isn’t really a problem now, is it?
Frankly, anyone whining about this deserves all they get…
@ Eva: Henry, you might have saved your lost post!
Thanks for the tip. I’ll take a look.
@ Frank: I had a problem with the smart quotes when I drafted the blog in Word (shut up, Grant) but the problem goes away if you do it with a simple .txt program like Wordpad or Notepad or similar. In fact, most Word-related problems go away with .txt … and don’t talk to me about documents people have created using that weird Word program they have in Vista. Fume fume spit dribble explode.
Comfort for some, here. But Ian having known about this, I presume it’s not his fix. Much sympathy from these quarters. One burned, twice shy.
@HH & Frank: I usually write everything in Word, and then paste into NN, but because it was hyperlink heavy and we can’t use html I decided to do it here instead. And the rest is history…
@Richard: It’s OK. The depths of my narcissism mean that I can glow from Scurry’s post without letting the inherent irony of the situation ruin my
hairday@HG2: We’ve built a snazzy little webpage builder here at my work. But good old Word brings acres of code with it when you paste documents so WYSINWYG by any means. The original release had a snazzy little window to help you edit code for formatting. It is now a snazzy big window so you can clean all the
shitsuperfluous code out of your documents. Trying to fix the easier way, by having folks prepare plaintext in .txt format wasn’t an option because “I’m used to Word though…” </comfort zone>I also belong to the Luddite text editor camp (with Henry it seems). Although I hate writing markup (come on folks, it’s the 21st Century already), if I have to do it I’d much rather do it offline in a nice little text editor that doesn’t understand the markup characters. Makes life much easier.
Of course, if NN spoke proper html instead of its own arcane markup language, that would help – do the blog posts use ‘proper’ html? The comments certainly don’t.
P.S. Bloody thing formatted my quotes as smartquotes instead of plain text ones. Just goes to show you. Something. Not sure what though.
MT4 will fix all that Richard. Just believe.
@Martin – I had a look at MarsEdit. Do you use it for posting – can it link to NN?
Do you think it’s worth investing in – or will the arrival of MT4 change everything and make it redundant..?
The latter.
…I can has not be redundant too? In these times of financial woe, do we need something like MT4 taking our jobs, stealing our children, poisoning our wells, worse even yet than the preternaturally cthonic soul eater…
…OK. Sorry. Too much Cthulu in my noodles during the signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act last night…
I know I should just use Notepad but somehow Word seems more comfortable. I guess I don’t have the heart of a true geek. I hated vi.
@Ian – just relax and have a gin and chthonic.
I hate vi. Emacs FTW!
@Frank: Genius mate. The first one will be raised in your honour!
@RPG: I think you’d better join me mate…
Damn right. And it’s not even 11 yet.
Stephen,
MarsEdit can directly post to most blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, etc.), but not Nature Network. For now I use it to save my posts in progress and to preview them (MarsEdit understands the Textile formatting used here).
I do prefer Textile over HTML for blog posts and comments. Among other things, HTML looks nasty in an editor and it is insecure if you don’t disable some of the tags.
I think that’s partly a matter of opinion, but definately a good point. I’m used to editing html (and getting at php) so scanning through code is “easy”. But when I first started it was a bit overwhelming. And it certainly helps to have a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver has.
Don’t “good” browsers “ignore” bad tags?