Fixing Scribe
A long time ago, in a New England town far, far away, I first started using computers to write documents and code. One of the first lessons I learned was to save my work early and often. For someone as hyperactive as me, there’s nothing worse than bashing out pages of text only to lose it all due to a system crash, mistyped command, pet yanking out the power cord, soda spilled on the keyboard, Act of God, alien invasion or any of the many other misadventures that conspire to reduce our productivity. I hate - absolutely hate! - having to redo work after believing that it was all squared away.
Over the years I’ve become a totally compulsive saver, my fingers daintily whacking Ctrl-S after every sentence or (not uncommonly) every word. Writing in the web browser (this blog, for example) is thus an exercise in frustration, since the saving process is so intricate and time-consuming. Save as draft. Reload. Find your place in the text box. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
So imagine my excitement when I discovered the Scribe extension for Firefox. It adds options to the File menu for saving and loading form fields from disk, and even overrides Ctrl-S so peace of mind is always a keypress away. Unfortunately, when I tried to use it on a blog entry, it happily saved my text but refused to load it, complaining about a “parser error”. Today I finally got around to poking around in their code, and I discovered that the problem is that the file is stored with a faulty character encoding. Since WordPress uses a bunch of weird non-ASCII formatting characters, this broke the XML parser that tries to read the text back into the web form.
To make a long story short, I fixed the problem and have been happily and compulsively saving web forms all day. So maybe geeks don’t get laid in high school, but being able to hack other people’s stuff almost makes up for it. I reported the problem and fix to the Scribe folks, so hopefully they’ll work it into the next release. In the meantime, if you’ve encountered this problem, drop me a line. I’ll send you the corrected version.
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Cool fix and would be particularly useful if it works with many fielded forms. But for a blog - rough draft in Word?
Comment by Julia — 7/27/2005 @ 9:02 am
Well for one thing: Word? Yuk!
Plus formatting doesn’t get preserved that way, and I like to format as I go.
Comment by Matt — 7/27/2005 @ 9:13 am
Please please don’t tell me you’d prefer to write longish docs in a form field rather than a text editor. That’s taking devheadedness too far!
Comment by Julia — 7/27/2005 @ 1:55 pm
I’m afraid that’s exactly what I’m telling you. I just wrote a massive doc for the blog (stay tuned) and I really don’t find it that bad. There are some inconvenience around typing HTML, but it’s still better than typing some other format and then converting it into HTML. Of course, I’m now using Scribe and I also use this.
Comment by Matt — 7/27/2005 @ 8:31 pm