Woe and Whoah!

Posted on December 21, 2019 by colonialist

 Typical of today, I did a whole long post wailing about its mishaps, but when I tried to add a picture it simply went away never to be seen again in draft or any other form.  I give up.

Colonialist.

About colonialist

Active septic geranium who plays with words writing fantasy novels and professionally editing, with notes writing classical music, and with riding a mountain bike, horses and dinghies. Recently Indie Publishing has been added to this list.
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12 Responses to Woe and Whoah!

  1. SueW says:
    December 22, 2019 at 8:16 am

    Thank will be interesting to read the outcome of this.

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  2. pensitivity101 says:
    December 22, 2019 at 12:53 am

    I had something like that happen to me the other day. Never did find the post concerned and had to start all over!

    Liked by 1 person

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  4. disperser says:
    December 21, 2019 at 1:56 am

    One other suggestion . . . compose everything outside of the editor. Word or any other text editor. Write the words and put placeholders where you want photos to go.

    Then, when ready, paste everything into the new post. Save. Then, go to the photo place holders. Delete the words so that you have a blank line with the cursor at the beginning of it.

    Don’t hit “Add Media” unless you’ve already loaded the files into the library. Just choose a photo or graphic and drag it to the page. The editor will open the media dialog and when it finishes loading, click on insert. The photo will be inserted wherever you have your cursor. Hit save. Repeat for other photos.

    Then, hit publish when done. This way, even if you lose every word you typed on the post, you still have the outside file with the words and you can try posting them again. This process minimizes the chance you will lose anything.

    And, yes, I still mostly believe there’s a high probability yours and other people’s issues I read about are caused by user errors. Not 100% sure, but I have a fair amount of experience dealing with people and computers. Computers always do what they are told. People, on the other hand, have a short-term memory problem. Ask them how something happened, and the first thing they will do is say “I don’t know” or an indignant “nothing!” and are then amazed when repeating the supposed steps, everything works.

    If it doesn’t, that’s even the more reason to get the help desk involved.

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  5. disperser says:
    December 21, 2019 at 1:04 am

    Have you tried getting with support and have them look into it?

    Also, are you absolutely sure you’re looking in the right place?

    I’m asking because it’s been a while now that WordPress has been well-behaved. Unless you’re using a different WordPress than I am, I’m at a loss to understand the problem you’re describing.

    Again, WordPress support has been stellar every time I’ve taxed them with resolving something I thought was wrong; in the majority of cases, it’s something I’m doing wrong.

    One possible explanation for what you describe (and it’s happened to me) is using the wrong keyboard/mouse combination to accidentally choose all of my text just before typing something new or importing something or pasting something. The result is all my text being replaced. When that happens, hitting Cntl-Z undoes the last action and should bring everything back . . . unless you move onto something else, in which case, it’s gone for good.

    I note you had that issue before when you accidentally created a link to the picture you were trying to bring into the post.

    Taking a moment to work out what just happened would help . . . as would the help desk. Get in touch with them either via e-mail or (preferably) an interactive chat.

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    • colonialist says:
      December 21, 2019 at 4:33 pm

      I thought I was using a tried and tested system I have employed for hundreds of posts. Obviously I didn’t. My fingles became all fumbs and my brain went into fuzzy-wuzzy mode.
      I normally post in Word, transfer text, and finally insert pictures. This time, everything abruptly vanished.

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    • disperser says:
      December 21, 2019 at 6:32 pm

      But, that means you still had the text in Word . . . or did that get wiped as well? Did you try it multiple times? Did you document what you did?

      One reason it could be getting wiped is if you’re still working with blocks. If you can’t get to the classic editor, you need to learn blocks.

      At the risk of sounding like a broken record. They’ve made it fairly easy to use whatever editor you want. The help desk can help if you’re still having issues.

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      • colonialist says:
        December 23, 2019 at 12:02 am

        I was sure I had saved the Word, but it was nowhere to be found.

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        • disperser says:
          December 23, 2019 at 12:09 am

          OK . . . Are you aware that Word has an autosave feature? You can set the time between automatic saves. Those are separate from actually saving the file.

          Also, if you have a Gmail account, you can use their online document creator and it saves every few seconds or whenever you pause more than a second or two.

          Just saying. If you have a history of losing stuff, there are options to mitigate the occurrences.

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