A couple of night ago, I was typing up a lengthy comment on a friend's blog. My friend had written a long and thought-provoking blog post and I wanted to give her a decent response.
This doesn't sound too exciting, right? Well, here comes the fun part. When my comment was near completion, I took a brief break to refresh some of the other tabs in my browser. After doing this, I went to the tab where my comment was and almost mechanically pressed the refresh button. The result? My comment was erased.
Obviously, I was annoyed, both for losing my comment and because I had made a mistake that I usually don't make. However, that mistake was not refreshing the tab; instead, it was not copying my message out of the comment box. When I'm writing a long comment, I normally copy and paste it elsewhere every so often so that I don't lose my content. In this case, I completely forgot.
The next day, I wrote my comment and then posted it. In fact, in hindsight I think losing the original comment caused a minor case of serendipity: my second comment was a major improvement upon the first, as I was able to say more than what I'd said before, except with fewer words.
As for why I wrote about this, it makes for a good lesson about the importance of backups. Even making a copy of a comment you want to post on a blog counts as a backup!
Yep, I remember doing that on Bubblews. Now I always make sure I copy!
ReplyDeleteUsually I copy, but I completely forgot in this case!
DeleteAh, yes. I know this feeling. I've lost count of the amount of times I've lost a lengthy comment or text post (usually when posting on Tumblr from my phone) and cursed myself for not saving it somewhere else (even in part) as I was writing it.
ReplyDeleteWhen re-writing it, like you mentioned, you find a way to be more concise as you've already worked out what you want to say and what thoughts, ideas and examples ought be mentioned. But also, you can figure out how much a particular topic means to you in the process just upon making the decision of re-writing the entire comment out again. And this is particularly true if the article is on a well-known site (e.g. a new website) and say, you want to clarify and correct a few errors that were made in the article which are influencing the readers to think completely differently about the topic (in a way that is not based entirely on accurate facts).
I think I lost about half an hour writing the original comment. :/
DeleteI've wondered how much longer my comment would have been if I hadn't lost it and re-written it