One browser feature that would take the market!
Douglas KarrThanks for stopping by my personal blog on Marketing Technology! Over 50,000 visitors a month find my content worth returning for, so don't forget to subscribe to the Marketing Technology Blog RSS feed or to the Marketing Technology Email to have new content sent directly to your inbox. You may also find my other business blog helpful, Social Media Domination.
Earlier tonight, I was working on a great blog post - a collection of links that I’ve discovered in the past few weeks that I wanted to show to all of you. I wanted to round the number off at an even 10 just to make it a ‘Top 10′.
I perused my saved bookmarks and wrote some little witty statements for each one that would catch your attention and make you chuckle. After completing each link, I would open a new tab (I use Firefox), go to my bookmarks, and open up the link. You might already know what happened next. I clicked on my bookmark and opened the new site right in the tab where my post was 90% completed.
NOOOOooooooooooooo! I clicked STOP. I clicked BACK. I clicked UNDO. It’s gone.
This was the post. This was the post that was going to make me a blogging star. The post that was going to seal my book deal. The post that was going to have thousands of trackbacks, make the top of Digg, and put me in the Technorati Top 100. But it’s gone.
So here it is… the one browser feature that would consume the entire market. The form-on-the-fly-save-and-undo-the-stupid-click-that-I-just-did-that-I-did-not-mean-to-click. I don’t have a catchy name, I wasted all my wit earlier on my brilliant set of links. I don’t understand why computers can’t do this, though. If your keyboard is an input device, and the letters can appear on the screen, then why (OH WHY!!!) can’t the computer remember what you just wrote in a text area 1.8 seconds prior to accidentally changing the page.
So there you go Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera… that’s the feature that I will forever love you for. Please, please put it in your next release. Please.
An added benefit to using blogjet is that you can save draft posts locally to your hard drive. Adding images is also a breeze.
There are other types of posting software, ecto comes to mind, but look into it. Saving one epic post is worth the price of admission.
Please don’t hate Blogspot because it is beautiful… You gotta love it’s save-your-work-on-the-fly functionality…
Or, you could compose your posts in Google Docs which also has an auto-save functionality.
Things might go wrong, especially in MSIE and Firefox, if your compose field is on a page that forbids any caching. Opera is a bit more conversative, and more often eschews refreshing the page on pressing ‘Back’.
Tom: I checked out Blogjet, unfortunately there’s no Mac version.
It looks like a great little app, though!
William: I actually had my blog on blogspot for quite a while. I liked it but once I started to attract some attention, I really wanted my own domain. I didn’t want to Blogger to ‘own’ me and my content. I didn’t realize they had that feature, though. I’m going to do some looking and see if I can find a similar feature for WordPress.
RIJK: Who knew? Thanks so much for sharing that with me. I’m going to download Opera 9 and see how I like it!
I’m not lucky enough to have a mac, but I’m sure you could find a free key logger for it. Here’s one I found from a quick Google search:
http://www.securemac.com/typerecorder.php
(no, I don’t work for that company!)