Did the site just have a hiccup of some sort?

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I've been working on a piece here since Saturday evening. I put in about ten hours before I started having trouble staying awake, so I copied what I had over to Open Office just in case, then wandered off to bed, catching twelve hours or so before I woke up just after midnight EST. I've spent most of the time since then back at the grind here after checking nothing had been lost.

About five minutes or so ago, as I was adding some ®s to mark items that are registered trademarks, the page suddenly went nuts, literally flipping the text to a point other than where I was working at that point, and also wiped out a few lines at the end.

I had to go back, check the things i was trying to fix, and fix them again. I wasn't happy about it, but a few seconds extra work isn't a big deal, I suppose. I'm just glad I didn't lose anything significant in the post.

Comments

Probably local

erin's picture

Inputting text into a box on the screen has almost nothing to do with how the website works. Until Save is selected and entered, nothing done in that box communicates anything to our servers, and our servers are not communicating to remote machines. That's not how it works.

Whatever it was that happened, from the description above, was almost certainly local. Since ® is entered by Opt/Alt-R, I wonder if there is any keyboard shortcut that would be activated by pressing that combination one key off in any direction?

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Mac user here

When I need stuff like that, I use this webpage: http://symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/accents/codemac.html

Actually, for that character, I only need to press Option + R and it's there on the screen. I noticed afterward that if my finger pressed the alt part of the Option key by mistake, it wouldn't work, but that was easy to sort out.

The odd part is that, while I was doing this, the page itself flipped to a completely different section.

Then, when I scrolled back to where I had initially been using the ® character, those lines I had written only a minute before were no longer present, even though everything else was still there.

That was why I asked if the site might have been acting odd. I've never seen lines vanish while entering text here before.

Computer vs Internet

erin's picture

That stuff is happening in your computer, not over the internet. :) The text entry box is on your computer, not on our servers, until you hit preview or save. You were not "entering text here" (meaning on BC), you were entering text there, meaning on your computer. :)

If the site had a "glitch" while you were entering text, you wouldn't know it unless it affected what the site did the next time you hit preview or save or did one of the other things that would have communicated to our servers. It could not possibly affect your display or the contents of the editing box because that stuff is being done on your machine, not our servers.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

I always compose stories on

Brooke Erickson's picture

I always compose stories on my system (or more likely on my Dana Wireless, then import those to OpenOffice). I do Save As HTML in OO, then use my text editor (TextPad) to clean up the HTML.

Once that's done I can go here, open up the text entry box for the story and just copy & paste everything from the file on the computer to the text box here. A quick preview to make sure things didn't get munched and I can post the chapter.

This also means that I have 4 copies of the file:
The Alphaword document on he DANA, the RTF file that synching the Dana to the computer creates, a second RTF file because I always copy the file(s) from the synch directory to one where I can work on them, and the exported HTML file that I've edited with TextPad.

I keep the RTF and edited HTML files (I change the exported HTML file's extension from HTML to HTML.txt so the text editor won't complain).

This makes it easy to re-post or to post on another site.

Brooke brooke at shadowgard dot com
http://brooke.shadowgard.com/
Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world
"Lola", the Kinks

Yes, yes!

Sara Selvig's picture

While it is technically called a "text box", it is better to think of it as a "paste box" into which completed stories are "pasted." That leaves your text safely in your OpenOffice (or other secure typing environments) where it stays safe until you set your tea cup on the backspace key!

Over the years I have found numerous ways to destroy the OpenOffice text area, though. :(

Sara


Between the wrinkles, the orthopedic shoes, and nine decades of gravity, it is really hard to be alluring. My icon, you ask? It is the last picture I allowed to escape the camera ... back before most BC authors were born.

I've been working...

On the new story I've had in my head for the last week or so since early Saturday evening.

I got about ten hours of actual work on it done out of about fifteen hours total before I needed to sleep on Sunday morning.

Started again around 12:30 AM Monday, put in about twelve hours of actual work out of about eighteen total before sleep became a necessity.

Before I wandered off to my bed each time, I copied it to Open Office and saved it, so it was fine when I was ready to start again.

For some reason, I find the page colour here less irritating than the bright white of Open Office, here doesn't bother me as much. One of my health issues is extreme light sensitivity, so bright white anything will drive me up the proverbial wall. LOL

Anyway, for all of that work so far, I have 13,300 words on the new piece, and still have a fair bit to do. Back to work I go. LOL

Colors

erin's picture

I picked the colors here to be easier on the eyes deliberately. :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.