Sunday, November 20, 2005

BLOG RANT

OK, so you would NOT believe the problems I suffered trying to publish yesterday's post! I began composing it at around 6AM and did not actually semi-successfully publish it until 7PM (with generous breaks to eat, get another cup of coffee, go to the bathroom, bang my head on the computer desk, and attend a friend's jewelry party).

First, about 3/4 of the way through composing, we had a power outage -- GONE! Power came back on minutes later and I started over only to have the power flick off for a few seconds -- GONE AGAIN!! AAARRGH!
Yes, I tried to save my work but was not able to.

After starting over for the THIRD time, typing quickly and not stopping to proofread, I finished and clicked the SAVE AS DRAFT button. Whereupon I received an Error Message: Your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is broken Huh? I know nothing about Web page technicalities (for years I thought HTML was an abbreviation for Hotmail). I checked my saved drafts and, guess what? Not there!! 'Bout this time my mind is bordering dangerously close to a psychotic break.

I searched through my saved drafts and eventually found it but could only view it in HTML form. I saw typos needing correction and the spacing and font size was all messed up, but I was unable to change any of that. I went to the BlogSpot help sites, read all the current issues, and known problems. No help there. I emailed Blogger support and received a generic email listing topics that might help and found one that had a tutorial about HTML. This quick crash course gave me enough extremely limited understanding to go back and monkey around with a "tag" at the end of my post. This allowed me to finally be able to publish, but not correct errors. When I tried to edit the post I lost it for a while again in cyber neverland. When I finally tracked it down and got it published I had to just suffer the typos, improper spacing, and unwanted font size changes.

I'm telling ya, it was enough to make me give up blogging for good. Obviously, I haven't, but if this post gives me any guff I'm outta here!

3 comments:

Cheri said...

I can relate.

Adversity builds character, they say.

And you are a character, I have pictures from your 40th surprise birthday party to prove it.
:)

Thomas J Wolfenden said...

I've had that problem a few times in the past... Frustrating to say the least.

Here's what I do... I do most of my writing at work on my lunch break where I don't have access to the internet but do have MS Word.

I'll write everything in Word and save to 3.5 floppy disk. When I get home in the morning I'll just copy & paste to my blog. A little time consuming, yes, but it does give me an added safety feature. I have a second back-up to everything I've written so far.

Might I suggest that you write in Word or whatever program you use and when you're completely satisfied with what you've written copy & paste.

Hope that helps some...

Lora said...

Let me first say: I'm surprised to find this post because I got the same error message when I tried to publish and figured it was a goner. I have no idea what's going on.

Cheri: Are you saying I've had a lot of adversity or a little adversity? And, yeah, I know you've got the pics from my 40th -- just keep 'em off your blog! :)

Tom: Thanks for your suggestion. I may start doing that, but I'd sure like to figure out what happened and get it straightened out.