Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

This is not the original WordPress Wednesday post that I had intended to make, picking up from last week about changes to my site. It’s not even the backup subject that I started to write about, regarding cool WordPress themes for developers. This is a cautionary tale about saving your work.

See, I had originally planned to pick up from my previous post, and write about progress in working on this site. Except that last week went kaboom, and the first couple of days of this week weren’t all roses and bon-bons, either. So, I had started writing a post about some of the niftier WordPress themes that I’ve seen lately. And I had made pretty good progress on it, too.

Until my fingers accidentally brushed the keyboard in a fatal manner. I somehow managed to hit CMD-A (which does “select all”, followed by a few other random keys. So my post content was selected, then replaced by the other keys I had hit. And in an instant, before I really realized it happened, the WordPress auto-save function kicked in. When I tried to Undo the edit, it was to no avail, it only undid the last couple of keystrokes.

I had made the fatal error of not explicitly saving my post content along the way, so I had no post revisions to fall back on. Only the last auto-save, which contained the less than inspirational content of “kvx”. I didn’t think that “kvx” would be of much interest to my readers, and I don’t have time to recreate my original post right now. So instead, you get this hard-lesson-learned advice to always save your work-in-progress, even when there’s an auto-save function in your app.

As soon as time allows, I will re-write my post about WordPress themes for developers. Until then, please learn from my failure, and click “Save” frequently!