I use Windows Live Writer to compose my blog posts. I’ve been using it for close to two years at this point, and I will continue to do so because I have never been able to find a better alternative for what it does. It is simply the best choice for bloggers who want an easily customizable and updateable WYSIWYG editor. There is nothing out there that even comes close to both its ease of use and functionality. You have a few options that come close on the Mac, but all of them fall short of doing the actual work of the WYSIWYG without being a pain in the ass. I wish it wasn’t true. I wish it wasn’t Microsoft that had the best product (for the firs time in at least 15 years). Alas, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
Today, however, it is the reason I am sitting at my work desk and fuming incoherently to the air around me.
You were supposed to receive at about 12:00 a wonderful short story from my adolescents. It was about an experience I had in 8th grade resulting from a combination of my (then) recent discovery of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, my ever growing frustration with boring teachers, the development of the fact that some of them actually felt the need to put me in my place, and a bully I was forced to sit next to that, for the sake of personal growth and development I had decided to name “Dickface Cocktottel” instead of calling him by his real name, “Ryan.” I believe this name shows a real growth in my emotional maturity.
I spent about 3 hours this morning working on drafting and refining the 1100 word story into something experimental and new for me. I had actually written it in the form of a full on narrative, complete with beginning, middle and end. Yeah, that’s right, I wrote a damn story this morning instead of just ranting on my blog like a rabid weasel that had learned to talk at the same time it did a shit ton of crystal meth.
Then, bad, bad things happened.
For anyone familiar with a word processor, you know that CTRL+B = Bold. You might even be familiar with the fact that CTRL+N = Open a new document.
What you might not be familiar with is that Windows Live Writer doesn’t have a little thing that pops up and asks, “Do you want to save the changes to this document before you close it?”
It just switches to a new document… deleting forever the old information.
Thus, with one simple, easily made typo, I deleted my entire 3 hours of work. Purging it out into the digital sea forever.
I exploded. I cried. I died a little inside.
Then I changed my settings in Live Writer so that from now on if I hit CTRL+N it will open a new copy of the program instead of just creating a new article and deleting the old one.
Then I typed this.
This message to all of you to remember to click “Save” every once in a while. A message to everyone out there not to rely too heavily on the intervention of the computer’s brain for you, otherwise, you end up loosing a lot of work, and you can never get that back.
This post is part of the Scintilla Project. It is the last day of Scintilla, go and check out the other blogs!
Tags: Frustration, Intervention, Scintilla Project, Software, Windows Live Writer