Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Losing work is NOT a thing of the past

Remembering WordPerfect makes me feel old, but never having to ever use WordPerfect again makes me feel youthful and free. In the "olden days," typing merrily along (with my copy propped against a steel TypePal copy holder), I might accidentally hit the insert key instead of the delete key. There I'd be, blithely overwriting unknown quantities of characters, sentences, or paragraphs, instead of simply deleting one character and moving on.

Then there were random crashes, file naming errors (this was back when filenames were restricted to—I forget exactly—maybe 8 characters, and couldn't include spaces), and seemingly scores of other interesting ways to ruin your day by losing the work you'd done.

Today, I use Dropbox and a variety of other tools and I feel super safe about my work always being saved...but it's a false sense of security. Sure, my Word docs are backed up to Autosave all the time and to Dropbox at lightning speed, but that lulls a person, doesn't it? Makes you forget about the importance of constantly saving. Makes you forget about the difference between composing in Word and composing in a browser.

Makes you scream and whine bad words when you're trying to learn WordPress and you've been composing in the browser and suddenly you get a very nasty error:
Not Acceptable
An appropriate representation of the requested resource /public_html/wp-admin/page.php could not be found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
and then you just can't recover the post, no matter what you try. (Like, copying the entire text, intending to paste it into another doc, but then copying your password onto the clipboard just before deleting everything...)

Lucky for me, I won't have to rewrite much; maybe thirty minutes worth of work. Lesson learned.

Mostly. I'm actually composing this in the browser. Old dog.