I just discovered a very significant flaw in this blog software, and I’m pretty pissed off about it. I just spent about 15 minutes tapping out a lengthy update of the past couple of days and my visit with Tim & Kate (and Isaac). Since it was pretty long and it is now 4:18 in the morning, for the first time ever I pressed “preview” instead of “submit”.
It only showed the first couple of paragraphs, so I hit “read more” and it gave me my true home page, without the new article. I hit “back” on my browser and it reloaded a blank entry form. I tried a few ways to get back to the correct screen but it seems pretty clear that post is gone.
I’ll try to re-do it tomorrow but it is not likely to contain the same detail. Suffice to say: pleasant trip, miss James.
‘Night
Yep
The reason is that the software shows you the edited version first, and then as you scroll down, it shows you the entire article (as it will be presented) and then the edit box, just in case you want to make more edits. Perhaps people shouldn’t blog when they are tired 😉
As for the “read more” … it’s showing you the preview (next time note the title) 🙂
James who?
Yeah, I kind of miss you too. The pooches?? Well all I can say is *snore*
Back
Fine, but it still should retain the text when I hit “back” on my browser. That is a flaw. It should be fixed, and whoever let the software go out like this should be shot. Oh well, it’s free software, what can you do but try not to make the same “mistake” again.
Well, I’ll be damned
Chris, I always copy my new entry to the clipboard before I spell check it and post it. A few times recently I was very glad I had done that.
Developer POV
Having worked on a web app in the past, I have to say that dealing with people clicking the forward, back, and refresh buttons is difficult. The problem is that the web app is not completely integrated with the browser. So when the user clicks one of the browser buttons, the web app is not always able to capture that. It is best to always use the navigation tools supplied by the app instead of the browser. Just beware that using the browser buttons can (and often will) lead to loss of data you have entered.
Did I say that nicely enough? I’ve had to give that speech a couple of times to my user base 🙂
Paying Off
See these meetings are paying off 🙂