The Book Review that Wasn’t

Last night I wrote a review of a book. I was pretty pleased with the results. It actually talked about the book for a while. This morning I tweaked it a bit and hit post.

It vanished.

Well, mostly vanished. The title was there, as was the little blurb at the top. Everything else was gone. “Poop!” I said (or something like that).

I use ecto to compose my larger blog episodes; the offline editor is much nicer than any in-browser editor I’ve encountered, especially on my 8-year-old laptop. I don’t call it Ol’ Pokey for nothing. Plus there are times I want to write an episode but the Internet is nowhere in sight. ecto has been working very well for me. Except when it loses my work. This is the second time, but somehow this one hurt more. Also, ecto was recently bought from the original developer and seems to be stagnating.

“Looks like it’s time to give MarsEdit a serious look,” I said, and downloaded the latest. I fired it up and was greeted with “Your trial period has expired.” Dang. I’d launched it once when comparing ecto and MarsEdit back in the day. MarsEdit was missing a particular feature (don’t remember exactly what) and that made ecto the winner. Before it started losing my work.

Lots of people like MarsEdit (lots of people like ecto, too), but am I willing to pay for it without writing a single episode with it? That’s hard to justify. I’m downloading a program called Qumana to rewrite the book review with. We’ll see how that goes.

Edited to add: Nope. Qumana didn’t work. At all. I checked the system requirements, and it should work. But it doesn’t.

4 thoughts on “The Book Review that Wasn’t

  1. I know a great program called “Jer’s Novel Writer.” You could always write your post there, and paste it into what/where ever you would like.

    I’ll try to find a link to the download, I hear, if you are a Mac uses, it’s really quite something!

    pL

  2. I thought about it, but one of the nice things about the dedicated blogging packages isthat they keep things synchronized when you edit one version or the other.

    Next I thought about putting that feature into a Jer’s Blog Writer package. Probably not going to happen, though.

  3. The blogging feature of MS Word 2007 is actually pretty nifty, or at least it would be if it weren’t so buggy. It’s easy to use and easy to understand, and it’s compatible with the major blogging sites. Early on, it hung up frequently (but at least the crash-recovery process worked nearly all the time). Now I’ve gotten enough software patches that it only crashes for about one blog post in 20 or so. And I haven’t actually lost a post in nearly a year.

    Why, oh, why, oh, why, oh … does MS come up with great ideas and then totally blow the execution of them?

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