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32 comments

  2. Juhani Huopainen

    Always write in Word, and manually save every 15 minutes to another copy (in case the doc one is writing becomes unrecoverable). When finished, copypaste to web platform. I learned this the hard way, too.

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      Composing in Word for the Mac does not work well for transfer to WordPress (largely because Word for the Mac is pretty awful in general) but I appreciate the sentiment.

      1. Uahsenaa

        Is there something like Notepad (i.e. a formatting free ascii/unicode text editor) for MacOS? It’s what I always used to compose and then would copy and paste the paragraphs into wordpress to add an formatting after the fact.

        1. ric

          Yes. TextEdit = Notepad

          Albeit that TextEdit now formats by default in RTF and RTFD. But, all can be converted to ASCII.

          1. Schwa

            I compose all longer posts – even comments here – in a simple text editor, and save it to my desktop. If I find myself writing more than 3-4 sentences, I stop myself, copy and paste the text out of the web editor, and move into a Notepad++ type editor.

            Yves, I’m sorry the web / WordPress / etc. stinks. They definitely do. But you’ve been bitten before and need to defend yourself from Murphy.

        3. Tara

          I write in byword on the mac. It’s a plain text, markdown enabled editor. There are other editors geared toward bloggers that post to WP and other CMS engines.

      1. Yves Smith Post author

        We migrated off Blogger years ago.

        The blog was mistakenly taken down as a spam blog by Google . Normally take 2-3 weeks to get that reversed. I had a C-level contact then and so was able to get it fixed in 24 hours.

        No longer have that contact (he’s at another Big Tech Firm You Heard Of) and it is too risky to entrust your intellectual property to Google.

  3. Corey

    Horrible. My sympathies.

    You might try a nice plain-text editor, to avoid those annoying paste-from-Word issues. Most nowadays have some default autosave feature.

    People seem to like iA Writer. I use nvAlt, which is free and open-source, and has a nice full-screen mode.

  4. Eric Zuesse

    Have you tried Apple Pages instead of Microsoft Word? Pages allows easy embedding of links, and doesn’t crash often as Word does. But Pages is as stupid as Word: for example, Pages has no pagination.

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      The problem is I am insanely time constrained, so any migration from another format over to WP involves more routine work. Even though this is a three hour disaster, I haven’t had a serious loss in at least six months. When you amortize three hours over six months, even a couple of minutes a post adds up to more time. Frankly just copying and pasting into a Sticky is as efficient a backup. I got an error message when uploading a document, and I didn’t recognize that as a warning. I tried saving, which also failed and led to the data loss. If I had recognized the upload problem as trouble and had saved my work outside of WP, I would have been OK.

      1. Winston Smith

        If you’re typing directly into a web form, you might find the Lazarus Form Recovery addon useful. It’s available for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. It automatically backs up the form text as you enter it. If you have a crash or other malfunction, you can click on an icon to recover the text.

  5. aliteralmind

    I have given up directly creating and editing things on websites, not even in company contact-us forms. Too many times the page crashes, and you lose everything. The same is doubly true on phones and tablets, where the browser crashes are more frequent. (Yahoo Mail on the desktop is an exception, which reliably auto-saves to the draft folder every couple of minutes.) I do not trust WordPresses save functionality, not even in the slightest.

    I now compose and edit only in Sublime Text (a plain text editor on Windows, Mac, and Linux), and for my wordpress blog, I have gotten into the habit of select-all-copying in Sublime, alt-tabbing to the browser (which is a WordPress edit page), then select-all-paste, and finally tab-tab-tabbing to the wordpress “preview” button and pressing enter.

    I keep a permanent blog-post archive on my desktop, and it’s what I consider the “primary” copy. If I make changes in the future, I do it in my desktop copy, and then paste it back to wordpress. (And I back up my entire computer with crashplan–I don’t mess around!)

    As far as text editors, I love SublimeText. Although there’s a learning curve, it has excellent auto-completion features. There’s also the much simpler (Windows only) TextPad.

    Sorry this happened to you.

    —

    If you’re curious, here’s an example auto-completion file in Sublime: http://dpaste.com/248GAMC

    (So you can type “uli”, and an unordered list template is created.)

    More complicated/multi-line snippets can be placed in a file by themselves: http://dpaste.com/3E3MMWE

    (This one can be activated with, for example, “bhp”. It prints a beginning html page.)

  6. Speck Kevin Pratt

    One option if you want to do a small investment in time is to learn markdown. It’s a way to write plain text that can easily be converted to html. A link for example, [Google](http://google.com).

    An addon to WordPress converts the markdown to html for you. https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-markdown/

    You can write markdown in any text editor from notepad to several nifty plain text editors like iA Writer. It’s not difficult at all and easier than typing html.

    Markdown Basics

  10. Banger

    Running a WP site is a heroic task–I’m impressed y’all do as well as you do. Word, as a program, is very powerful but conceptually flawed in its basic design. Word Perfect was much better since everything was based on tags, like HTML so there was nothing in WP that couldn’t be diagnosed and the problem easily solved. I have no idea why WP lost out to Word–I was involved in transitioning the office I worked in from WP to Word (in the mid-90s and absolutely did not “get” the reason behind it.

  14. azrielle

    MY solution to this problem is to use a separate text editor (such as EditPadPro, or Crimson Editor), first, to compose, then plug in the results to wordpress, facebook, or whatever.

  15. Lambert Strether

    All comments have been moderated at of 9:00PM. If, during the outage, your comment was eaten or disappeared, it’s gone, so best to check carefully that it hasn’t shown up in some unexpected place and — after carefully copying it so you don’t lose it because the Internet is a hostile computing environment! — repost. Please be patient in case it shows up in moderation again and we have to pull it out. Thanks for your patience.

  16. OIFVet

    I would truly appreciate recommendations for Android browser to use on my phone. The current one simply can’t hack it following the NC upgrades. That’s what I get for being tech lazy and sticking with the basic browser, and I am enthusiastic about doing the trial and error thing to find a decent browser. Any recommendations will be extremely helpful.

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