I’ve been blogging now for three years and never found a solution for a nagging problem. You’re writing a post late at night. You’ve spent an hour formatting everything, uploading pictures, doing a spell check, researching the post and pasting in quotations. Then you get distracted somewhere else on the web and forget about your post. Then you decide that 3 AM is way past your bedtime and shut down your browser and pc. You come back the next morning looking for the post you created last night and its NOT THERE! Omigod! Where did it go? Didn’t you save it? When it finally dawns on you that fatigue got the better of you and you didn’t save it–what a dumbass you feel like!
Or how about this alternative scenario? You’ve written a post and are just putting the finishing touches on it when something happens that your browser doesn’t like and it crashes. Another way to lose a post. I’m sure you have your own horror stories.
Now, I’ve got a solution for WordPress users: Twilight Autosave by Twilight Universe. Here’s how the author describes the plugin:
There has been talk for a while now about modern applications being able to autosave as you type. Or rather that they should be able to do so, certainly modern web applications should be able to.
Well WordPress is a modern web application and, with this code, now it can.
This is a plugin for the admin site of things. It uses cookies and JavaScript to save the data you are typing and allow you to restore it (or delete it) later…
…When you have typed an entry in the Write Post screen but not saved or published it, the data in the main post box will be saved. When you come back up to a week later you will be informed you have an auto-saved post and can delete or restore it. Note: Any new typing in the main post text box will overwrite the existing autosave…
This is designed for v1.5 of WordPress. I’m told by the incredible PhotoMatt that he plans to fold this code into the next version of WP… which gives me a warm feeling. Until then enjoy, and I’ll continue to develop this. As always suggestions are welcome.
The author notes that he doesn’t yet offer support for WP 2.0. But that’s the version I’m using and the plugin works like clockwork for me. It appears that Matt did not fold this feature into WP 2.0 as Twilight Universe said in the above passage. Too bad. Because WP users need such a lifesaving feature.
A background note, I’ve posted twice at the WP support forum asking for an autosave plugin. No one responded. So I believe that this plugin isn’t as known as it should be (which is why I’m writing this). Special thanks to my WordPress mentor, Carthik Sharma, who found this plugin for me.
