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Friday 18 May 2007

Blogger: autosave & more keyboard shortcuts at last, thank you!






Fabulous. I just noticed that if you're using Blogger's post editor it now automatically saves a draft in the background as you go along, once a minute, without your having to do anything - just like with draft emails in Gmail.

But it doesn't do that when you're editing an already-published post, which is fair enough and very sensible.

I've been wanting something like this like, forever, because I've lost too many long posts to browser or PC crashes. I'd taken to drafting long posts offline using e.g. the open source Web editor NVU, or if I was using the post editor I'd regularly hit Save as Draft, then go back into the post from the Edit Posts page, which slowed me down some but was better than tearing my hair out or weeping because a difficult post had vanished with a crash.

As a keyboard shortcut fan, I'd had in mind ctrl-s as a hotkey for saving and continuing, but automatic is excellent, thank you thank you thank you Team Blogger, bless all your little cotton socks!

And, you know what else? I just checked and they have added ctrl-s as the hotkey for "Autosave and keep editing", too. And ctrl-shift-p to toggle between Preview and Compose view (that's not so new, but still).

And changed "publish" to ctrl-p - yes yes yes, far too often I've accidentally published a post when I didn't mean to, because I tried to use ctrl-x and slipped and hit s instead. My cup positively runneth over!

Now, if only they'd introduce (1) a keyboard shortcut to toggle between Edit and Compose tabs, and (2) ctrl-shift-l for a bulleted list, my happiness would be complete. (Yep, give me an inch and... )

Thanks again, this is absolutely marvellous.

2 comments:

Gary said...

Gotta love the Google Blogger team for making Blogger better and better.

The next on my wish list would be a "future post" feature where posts will be automatically posted like the Wordpress feature. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Improbulus said...

For sure, Gdog!

If you want a "future posts" feature try Emailschedule. Not as easy as posting from the Blogger post editor, granted, but it does work, and even accepts full HTML. It's just a question of getting a free Emailschedule account, and copy/pasting your finished post from Edit HTML view into your Emailschedule email.

You get an extra footer added to your post unless you pay a very modest donation, but that's fair enough, and worth the fee for many.

Hope that helps!