I Hate Web-based Blogging Tools (and they hate me)

After spending 30 minutes pulling together a blog post, my hand slips and hits a key combination.  My web-based publishing software doesn't ask me if I'm insane for not saving my work.  It doesn't ask if I want to reconsider.  It dutifully creates a new page, thus wiping out everything I've written.  Time to start over...

Comments

[Saskboy]

I've lost a few that way. Such is the web, it giveth and taketh away.

[Eric Eggertson]

Yes, it helps one examine whether the posting was worth doing in the first case. And if so, the second time around the writing should be nice and tight...

[Duane Brown]

That's one reason why I like using Wordpress. God only knows the times I've hit the wrong key and the system asked if I was crazy, which I replied only in my dreams.

But seriously, that does suck when it happens. One thing I do is I sometimes write things in Word before porting them into Wordpress. That may help with your small problem.

[James Whittingham]

Are you on Windows? If so, read on...

I am surprisingly impressed with a new desktop program for blogging from, of all people, Microsoft.

Windows Live Writer lets you save drafts automatically, like a word processor. It's got an optional Firefox plugin (and IE) that allows to you highlight a snippet of text from a web page and post it to any one or any number of blogs you may have.

I use it with Blogger but as far as I know, it also works with typepad and wordpress, amoung others.

http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D85741BB5E0BE8AA!174.entry

It's free, it's in beta, and it may be the first thing Microsoft has ever done right. You need .net installed, the latest version for some of the third party plugins that you can get for it.

[saskboy]

There's something called Qumana or like that too?

I've had Word Press lose something of mine, when I wrote in IE, hit the backspace, and it though I meant go back a page, and I pressed spacebar probably which confirmed to leave the page.

[Laura]

Yeah saskboy, I'm a big fan of Qumana because I can use it as a desktop offline editor for composing posts for my blog, and can publish right from Qumana when I have an Internet connection without logging in to my account. You can save without publishing in Qumana also. It's a free download, I'd recommend it.

[Eric Eggertson]

Thanks for the commiseration and the suggestions. I was using Qumana until I had a unrelated hard disk situation. Since then, I've been waiting until my move to WordPress to commit to an editing tool.