Writings
@#&! » Mon, Jan 10th 2005 3:09 pm
In order to truly understand the anger inside me at this moment, I’d like whoever’s reading this to imagine stubbing every one of your toes, then bashing your shin off a steel coffee table. That isn’t what happened, but the string of profanity that would result is what the title of this post would be were I not concerned about offending the young’uns.
What happened? I’d written a fairly lengthy article inside my site’s admin panel and decided I’d head to Google to look something up. I watched in horror as all my tabs were erased and the new Google tab opened. But false alarm: what actually happened is that for some reason, beyond anyone’s comprehension I’m sure, my opening of Google spawned a new browser window (I have an extension that prohibits such behaviour). I quickly realised there were now two Firefox buttons in my taskbar and closed the one showing Google. I smiled as it revealed my four tabs, ‘Offtone.com – Admin’ being one of them.
Then it happened. I, in all my excitement, double-clicked the tab. Can anyone tell me what double-clicking a tab in Firefox does? If you answered “It refreshed the mother-fing tab,”; you’re abso-fing-lutely correct. I was left staring at a completely blank content entry form and trying desperately not to forcefully insert my head into the monitor in front of me.
So I said ‘Screw it!’ and wrote this instead. What’s even sadder? I’ve lost half-written articles before. I get distracted, open some tabs, then close the whole damned window and it’s only nanoseconds after I’ve released the button that I’m aware of what I’ve done. So I’m off to devise a solution.
1 Ollie on Tue, Jan 11th 2005 3:23 am
LOL @ Aaron
Happened to me before. I’d all but finished my history homework (I’d been working on it for about an hour), and then the f*ing fuse went. Bloody annoying…
2 Aaron on Tue, Jan 11th 2005 7:12 pm
Ah, the dreaded power outage. Seems my area of town is extra prone to them. Luckily I haven’t lost any huge amount of work to them — yet. Fuses, too, are also going really often. I think whoever wired this place was only an electrician hobbyist.
Am still not sure how to prevent data loss though. I might end up writing a PC-based tool to talk to my database, but that sort of hurts the mobility factor. I’m writing THIS (though it’s just a comment) from my brother’s laptop in the basement.
Ideas?
3 Darcie on Tue, Jan 11th 2005 9:58 pm
well this was still an entertainig article. i am sorry though about your tab loss.
4 Aaron on Wed, Jan 12th 2005 10:48 am
Sweet. A new visitor!
Thanks
5 Ollie on Wed, Jan 12th 2005 12:36 pm
I got an idea (a first in itself
)…
How about some form of lockable tabs? Kinda like lockable layers in PS. You could make it so every action in them has to be confirmed first. If you lick refresh, you have to confirm the action first.
6 Ollie on Wed, Jan 12th 2005 12:59 pm
I meant click refresh not lick
. If you try and lick refresh you obviously have problems, and will probably need a new screen 
.
7 Glen on Wed, Jan 12th 2005 6:40 pm
use a javascript XMLHTTPObject to autosave at 3 minute intervals into a temporary articles table?
8 Aaron on Wed, Jan 12th 2005 6:44 pm
Was considering the auto-save actually. The ‘tab lock’ feature would require I learn XUL or whatever the hell those Firefox extensions are written in
I don’t think XMLHTTPObject would be required, but ya know what? I could probably just gather the field values and store those suckers in a JavaScript cookie every 3 minutes (I’d prolly do 1 minute, because I can type a fair bit in 3 minutes). Then when I come back to the page, load the cookie (which would expire in, say, 30 minutes).
Have I overlooked anything?