“Are you sure you want to do this?”
Having just pressed the ‘save draft’ button on a post I’ve been working on for quite a while, I was certain that I did want to “do this” i.e. save my post. So when WordPress asked me the question, I didn’t waiver. There were no alarm bells going off in the recesses of my exhausted brain. What could possibly go wrong? I hit ‘yes’ certain of the outcome. Except…
Instead of saving my post, WordPress deleted it.
Brilliant.
Clearly our blogging platform did not deem my lovingly crafted post worthy of seeing the light of day. Or night. It is forevermore lost in the virtual cemetery of other posts that have met a similar fate. I can only hope it receives a good welcome, wherever it may be. Doubtful. Very doubtful. I didn’t get the chance to teach it how to survive in the wild. Worse still, it may think that I abandoned it on purpose and with no one to reassure it of the opposite, it may loose heart and give up altogether. Is it too late to give it a fighting chance I wonder?
Dear post,
I am so sorry to have lost you. We had a good run, you and I. It is such a pity that our time together was cut short. You didn’t deserve that and I will do my utmost to put things right. While I figure out how to go about it, here are a few tips on how to survive in the blogging wilderness. I’m coming for you. Just you wait.
1. Don’t waste your energy trying to make it back to civilisation. Chances are you’ll take a wrong turn and then it will be impossible to track you down.
2. Wrap yourself up in something warm and find appropriate shelter. Failing that, build one. I’m told that lean-tos are your best option. I know you are afraid of spiders, but they won’t bite (unless you’ve made it to Australia in which case you’ll have to play it by ear).
3. Since there is no chance of me finding you tonight, you’ll have to improvise a bog-bed (it’s England, you know so it is bound to rain, although you’re better off with one even if you’re lost elsewhere).
4. Now may be a good idea to delve into that pocketful of treats you kept sneaking from my fridge and I hope you didn’t throw away your water bottle. If you’re out of both, do not despair. You can survive three days without water and three weeks without food. Let’s just hope it won’t come to that.
5. Make a fire, keep warm and wait for the rescue team to reach you.
I’m on my way!
And breathe. Relax and don’t forget to breathe. You won’t survive for long without air. Mind though, you are a blogpost… so what do I know?
vic briggs 
I write all my posts in Word first. Of course that doesn’t save them from accidental deletion.
I wish I had done that. Lesson learnt.
While I’m truly sorry to hear about your post running away, I’m happy that it inspired it’s mate. Well done, and way to parlay it into something positive. My computer in the newsroom crashes regularly, without warning, often taking my work with it. I also had a pet run away once, too. So yeah — I feel you, dog 😉
Oh, thank you Ned. I’ll have to rewrite that post. It took me long enough to figure out what I wanted to say and exactly how I wanted to say it so it was certainly a disappointment to loose all the work. Since I had committed too much time to it already (and it was a fairly serious post), I thought to better leave it for the moment.
I’m happy you enjoyed the alternative on offer. Needed a little humour after the disappearance act 🙂
oh, this is so funny…
Thank you, topazo. Spreading a little cheer around since I lost the post I wanted to share. Hoped I would’t make a dog’s dinner of it 😉
When I worked at the daily here, our newsroom PCs had just been converted to a new platform. The old one saved automatically when you hit the inch-count key. The new one did not. I forgot.
So I came toward the end of a full day of writing a Sunday magazine section cover spread. I came in very early to start writing it when nobody else was in the newsroom. I stayed after everybody else had left except for the editor who had to read it first.
I knew exactly how many hundreds of inches of column copy it was because I kept measuring it. It was going to fit in the center spread and four jump pages they gave me.
Just … about … done and the editor comes up to read over my shoulder. She knees my computer stand. The screen goes blank.
No panic. I’d been measuring it all along.
But I hadn’t saved it once.
I lost the whole Sunday cover story, a full day of undivided writing attention after four days spent in Nashville researching the piece.
It wrote a whole lot faster the next day because it was now in my brain, I knew what quotes I wanted where, my notes were in perfect order. In fact, I think it was more clear and precise the second time around.
But I never forgot to hit the save key again.
It will come back to you Vic, just give it a rest and its cousin will come racing out of your fingertips.
Good luck. Bad WordPress.
It’s good to know that your story had a happy ending. You got me worried there for a while. Losing the cover story would have been much much worse than what I have to deal with (after all, there are no deadlines as such for a blogpost).
Although it is tough to think of it as being for the best while the loss is so fresh, perhaps I will be able to rewrite it and do a better job of it second time around. Will let you know how I get on. Thank you for the story! Appreciated.
I hope I gave you some hope, Vic. You can do it.
You certainly did. Thank you. Unfortunately today has been rather manic, so I’ve written down all I could remember, but the piece is far from finished. Will have to return to it over the weekend.
I had the Sunday paper deadline to further inspire my flurry of re-writing, Vic. Different days. Good luck putting it back together this weekend.
Working to a deadline (however scary when work goes missing) can certainly help. I’m actually looking forward to rewriting it now and had a few ideas on how to improve it – just hope I can pull it off. Thank you, Mark.
Que sera sera! It is visiting with all those drafts that I lost when they suddenly disappeared off my computer!!
Well at least they have company for each other.
I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had similar trouble. It would seem that technology is not our friend, no matter how much it attempts to claim the opposite. Hehe and I do hope my lost post is in good company. I’d rather think that than imagine it rambling alone through the dark with some troll on its heels 😉
Sorry you lost your draft. So it isn’t in your “trash” folder? Maybe you have to proactively save it before you can trash it. I, too, compose my first drafts in Word and then copy into the WordPress editor when I’m pretty close. I don’t delete the Word file until I published the WordPress post…just in case.
Thank you. I will heed your advice and use word documents from now on. I had a look for the post: it’s not in my trash folder I’m afraid. I thought that WordPress saves drafts as you write them, and usually that is the case, but unfortunately it appears that we can’t rely on that always. I will have to rewrite it. There is nothing else for it. Perhaps after a good night’s sleep it will come back to me.
There’s a happy place out there for deleted drafts out there somewhere. I believe that. I do. 🙂
boy, that came out wrong. I meant to write “There’s a happy place for deleted drafts out there somewhere.” Blame my fatigue. >_>
No worries. It is rather late. Come to think of it I’d better go and get some rest before the rescue operation starts in earnest 😉
Haha I hope you’re right, and I hope the other drafts will be nice to my post and won’t scare it out into the night again 🙂
LOL. Love how you used humor to treat a very maddening situation. I had that happen once and now I typically write/edit in my documents file and when I am satisfied I copy paste to my WP edit page. I do the final edit there quickly before posting. So frustrating to lose good work. I hope what lingers in your memory will still see the light of day as a tribute to the post so abruptly set free in the wild. LOL.
Oh – thank you. I appreciate that and (trying to) share your optimism on that score. It is rather maddening. I’ve been piecing it back together today, but I’m still nowhere near finishing it. It looks like a job for the weekend. Too many competing demands on my time today, so will have to write a shorter piece and keep the lost one on the back burner until I can give it my full attention again. 🙂
Hang in there. I enjoy everything you write, and can certainly relate to competing demands. Be well and keep inspiring.
I feel your pain! I compose on the WP site, using my iMac. Inevitably, when I haven’t saved a draft, I accidentally ‘gesture’ incorrectly on my smart mouse and the screen wipes to right and I get the “do you want to leave or stay on the page?” When I click “stay”, it’s a blank and white as new fallen snow. I finally hit on the idea to search for ‘draft’ and then hunt the hyperlink with my mouse until the cursor changes, then click “save” very decisively. Then it reloads — with my latest writing — and I can continue. Technology…sure makes things easier. eh? 😉
Haha I’m still in awe at what the Mac can do and have to google “how to” things most days. So far it hasn’t eaten up any of my work, but now I know whom to go to when it does 😉
Thank you, Darrell.
😀
That drawing was very nice.
Thank you, KG. It didn’t take me very long to execute, mainly because I used another artist’s “dog ate my homework” cartoon as a template. I wanted to give them credit for the original, but unfortunately when I clicked on the image on google it took me to a site that no longer contained the cartoon and I could’t find it anywhere else. In any case, I was grateful for the inspiration – just wish I knew whom to send a note of thanks to.
Sorry sweetie, I have to admit I laughed at this, ‘wrap yourself up and keep warm’ lol! I was house minding recently and the cat liked to crawl into my lap, it managed to hit Command A then with its other paw typed gibberish, ok it might have been as good as what I was writing but the text editor got it back for me, The cat didn’t stop purring the whole time I was hyperventilating. Love the pic too, its awesome. ❤
Thank you, Scarlet. I’m glad it made you laugh. I was so upset when it happened – couldn’t believe my bad luck, but by the time I sat down to write my alternative post I was ready to delve into a little humour to make up for it. The more cheer the better. I’m glad that you were able to recover your work. I wish I had a way of doing the same 🙂
It’s always easier to laugh when it’s someone else, I’d probably have broken things. I’ve hit delete then quit before, it never asks if I really mean to do that, so I do lose things. 🙂
God speed little blog post. Or God speed big 1037 word blog post that you spent 3 hours on.
Still searching. Must have made it further away than I anticipated, but I won’t give up that easily 😉
Thank you.
Hahaha…you convey the frustration PERFECTLY! And one can never really recapture the eloquence of that lost post in the same way, for the same post.
BTW can’t believe I missed some of your posts that week in April, Vic…so remiss. 🙂
I only just saw your reply 🙂 Sorry for the delay of my own. It was a rather frustrating time and I am yet to find that post: the break didn’t quite help with that, but I am determined to track it down in the end. It was a resilient post after all and I may yet find it settled quite well somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic 😉
PS: One good thing about the break: it gave everyone a chance to catch up on older posts if they had the time and inclination 😀