10:20 PM Tuesday. Typepad was acting up today and has somehow swallowed the whole second half of my post Studio 60: In the cold, clear light of day. Not that I think you keep a scrapbook of my stuff, but if anybody has the page on their desktop from this morning still up or earlier versions of the post in their feed reader could you cut and paste it into an email and send it to me?
Email's lmannion109@yahoo.com
Thank you very much.
Update 7:40 AM Wednesday: Thanks Idyllopus for the attempt to help, but with the aid of maro at thisdayislikewidewater, who used a long quote from the original post in a shout out (much appreciated, btw), and my own obsessive personality, jogged memory, and disdain for a goodnight's sleep, I was able to reconstruct the post to the point that it makes sense again. If you read it after four in the afternoon EDT yesterday you probably thought, "Huh?" when you got to the end. If you want to know where I was heading scroll down to the paragraph that begins, "As a character, "Jordan seems to be nothing more than Sorkin's apology..."
If you do happen to have a copy of the original I'd still like too see it. I'm convinced there's some gem of a sentence in there that I couldn't recreate that should not be lost to posterity, because blogging, as you know, is an art form and what we type will last as long as the statue of Ozymandias.
In a comment here, Patience offered some wise counsel about composing posts offline with a word processing program and saving all drafts just in case. This is excellent advice. As it happens, I usually do write my posts offline, either on the computer or in longhand in a notebook, the longer ones anyway.
Isn't that fascinating? Aaron Sorkin could do a show about a blogger like me. He could show the Lance character frowning and typing just like the Matthew Perry character on Studio 60 but with more variation. He could show the Lance character frowning and scribbling.
In the pilot episode, Lance races to deal with a server crash.
Now that's drama!
Not that you are going to want to hear this right now...
With server based software you should always compose your posts in a medium where you can save locally so you keep a copy if things get screwy. Use notepad or your word processor.
Then when you are finished cut and paste into your web software. Gmail is currently one of the few web services that autosaves drafts while you type. The downside is that Google is keepeing a copy of everything you do while you use it, and you have no inherent rights with what they do with your data at the moment.
Once you get through the shock and anger at Typepad you will find you remember most of the details of your most recent writing. You may want to yell at the Typepad authors and demand they create an autosaving feature with local cache.
Posted by: patience | Wednesday, October 04, 2006 at 06:47 AM
On the episode, your blog would be cleverly disguised as lemonmannion.com
Posted by: velvet goldmine | Wednesday, October 04, 2006 at 12:58 PM
I agree with patience (the person, not the state of being). I compose everything in EditPad (a slightly jazzed-up version of Notepad) and c&p into MT. That way I have an archived copy even before it gets into the blog.
Posted by: Linkmeister | Wednesday, October 04, 2006 at 03:15 PM
Just saw this post - very glad you found my quotation and that it was helpful. (That blogspot is a note-taking spot for me, and the notes are in large part quotations -- it's my online version of underlining in a book while reading. I have wondered whether this could bother the authors whose words I cut & paste... I hope not. So, thanks, I'm glad to read that you appreciated the quotation as a shoutout.)
If there's actually a particular sentence that you are almost-recalling, a possible gem, and you can say what it was about, maybe I'll remember. The cut & pasting I do helps me to read in a such a way that the sentences stay in my mind for a bit..
And, hmmm, as you reconstructed, you added some all-new sentences too, right? About Bartlett vs Clinton? I like this turn: "no other woman and his wife". I'm enjoying your writing on the whole and will probably start reading this site regularly.
Posted by: Maro Cassimatis | Wednesday, October 04, 2006 at 04:53 PM