Monday 3 June 2013

How to Destroy a Blog Post

Picture the scene. Your humble scribe is hunched over his desk in the living room. For about two and a half hours he's been working on a long, theory-heavy post on the problem of privilege-checking, as so helpfully highlighted by those doyens of all things progressive, Louise Mensch and Dan Hodges. In all, it was a bit of a beast. Some 2,000 words were committed to the screen. It had all been edited and, for once, I felt rather pleased with myself. I think it did justice to the subject and offered a sociological take that has not really characterised the debate as waged on that febrile intersection of "celebrity" political bloggers and Twitter.

With the text done, I slipped into the ever-helpful Google Images to try and track something suitable down to illustrate the post. It was damn difficult, I can tell you. But I got there in the end. I coded it in, flipped it into 'compose' to apply the house style and ... I pressed the wrong button. Everything vanished in an instant. I quickly closed the window, knowing that Blogger backs up what's been written automatically and reopened the post. It had gone. Disappeared. Down the rabbit hole. 

Then came the shouting and swearing and cursing Google for removing the restore function from Blogger's panel many months back. My stupid for not paying proper attention. Their stupid for preventing me from rectifying a common error that occurs thousands of times every day. I am annoyed, very annoyed.

Still, at least I know how I'll be spending my time tomorrow night.

2 comments:

Evan said...

That's freaking annoying. After similar incidents using wordpress on the i-pad, I decided to write all my blog posts in Word first.

But not as bad as the time that a corrupt floppy disk wiped the first 10,000 word draft introduction to my PhD...

Gary Elsby said...

I well remember writing a few thousand words ripping off Rob Flello MP and then it disappeared from my screen.
God knows how that happened.

Imagine my joy when I realised I had to write it all over again!

Spare a thought for Ed Balls today.
After watching him stab the Labour Party in the head with an ice axe yesterday, he is now in every newspaper on earth informing readers how he wants to copy George Osborne's economic spending plans because HE wants 'credibility' (for Labour?).

Where the fuck do these people come from?