…ok, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I had to think of some catchy title for this week’s Works for Me Wednesday (hosted by Rocks in My Dryer).
You know how annoying it is to spend hours many minutes typing out a very thought provoking blog comment, post, thread reply, message board post, or some other “fill in this box” space - then you hit send, and *POOF*, all of your wonderful insights suddenly dissappear into the depths of cyberspace, never to be seen again? Nothing is more frustrating than seeing an ominous “internet explorer cannot display…” page pop up! You hit the back key or refresh in desparation, hoping your words will reappear. But they don’t. And all of the time you spent typing everything out is a waste. It may be due to a sudden internet outage (dog unpluged your modem, anyone? *raises hand*), or you may have taken so long to respond that you were logged out (“session time out”).
But what can you do?
I spent years pounding my keys in frustration each time this happened until I learned the neatest little trick a few years back. In fact, it was so obvious that I pounded my keyboard once more in annoyance that I had never thought of this before.
Anytime you are typing more than a sentence on the web that you will eventually “send” somewhere, you should always perform the following proceedure -
Hit “CTRL + A” to highlight all of your text.
Hit “CTRL + C” to copy the highlighted text.
Then hit send.
Now, if something goes awry, you have a copy of what you just wrote on your computer’s clipboard in case the page cleared the text from the box.
In the awful case that something does happen, just return to the blank box, position your cursor and hit “CTRL + V” to paste. All of the text you just lost magically reappears before your very eyes. (Ohhhh the wonders of modern technology).
And that’s my little secret to never ever losing what I have typed.
It works for me!