I spent about an hour last night recounting the odd events that made my trip to Korea so much more than just a typical race. Unfortunately, the Pulitzer worthy piece was deleted when I left my computer for a few minutes and Windows decided to restart itself after updating. I write all my 
blog entries in Microsoft Live Writer, but unfortunately this program lacks an autosave function. If you don’t save it or post it, and your computer restarts while your off eating Steak and Red Chard (and strawberry shortcake), then whatever you wrote is gone. gone gone gone gone gone. What really ticks me off is that it was two programs by the same company that collectively caused me to lose my work. Chris Tremonte also wrote about them, so you can read about it on his blog. Since he works for Microsoft, I’m guessing this was all a plan to get me to direct traffic to his blog. I’ll post some pictures tonight when I get to Tiburon.
Oh no, I have to leave for the airport in 90 minutes and I haven’t even unpacked yet, let alone packed. I hate leaving my room in a mess like this, there’s nothing worse than coming back from a trip to a messy room.
There is an easy to find ‘Save Draft’ button that I hit pretty regularly – but yes, autosave is a standard that should never be left out. Apparently the Live Writer team could not get their act together and the product was killed off – so until there’s a better product out there, we’re stuck. I also own a lot of MSFT stock still due to a decade or more of employment – so be nice. Where did you find that picture of my garage?
That was the park near our hotel. They rent out hundreds of bikes, including these kid bikes, so there’s little kids buzzing all over the sidewalk and through the park. It was really cool.
did you see graham?
Windows Live Writer has basic auto functionality. If you go to Tools->Options, it is the very first option you can enable; you will also need to set how often it will save. The reason we don’t turn it on by default is because it is _so basic_. It pretty much just a timer that clicks the save button for you every so often. It isn’t like real ‘Auto Save’ like in MS Word where you can open a draft and work for 20 minutes, then decide you don’t like your changes, close the app without saving and everything is back to how it was. If you did that in WLW you would be screwed because it has saved over the draft many times already. We realize this is almost a lose-lose situation and it is something we hope to improve in the future. Thank you for the feedback and I hope what I told you helps, or at least makes you think we aren’t plotting against you. 🙂
-Brandon
Brandon: Wow. That was incredibly easy. I feel like quite the tool. I still wouldn’t put it past Tremonte to plot my demise through the auto update channel, but luckily he’s not with the Live Writer team. When will you update Live Writer? The program is awesome, and I recommend it to each of my blogger friends, but there are some flaws that really should be fixed (e.g every time I post a picture I have to go into the html code and change where the picture height has been set to “-10” or else when I post it comes out as a flat line, and you can’t copy past from excel, and it would be nice if you could add captions to pictures other than using an overlay).
noah – I didn’t see graham over there because it turns out Mokpo is “just” 3 hours away, which is a lot for a Sunday afternoon.