When WordPress Gives You Lemons

Last week, I spent several hours working on a product review for the blog.  I wanted to add some photos, so I saved my draft and I tabled it for later.  Apparently, “later” meant “a lot later” though because when I came back today to publish the post, my draft had nothing in it but the title.  I was SO disappointed, as I’m sure you can all imagine.

This very thing has happened to me once or twice before in the past, but it didn’t frustrate me nearly as much because with those posts, I lost very little content.  I have WordPress set up to do automatic saves every so often, and I’ve also acquired the habit of saving my progress manually, so this wasn’t a case of me forgetting to save my work.  All my content was just gone, and I never figured out a way to find what I’d lost.

Feeling pretty frustrated and defeated, I shared my unfortunate discovery with the TSPN Zello channel.  I expected sympathy and commiserating, and there was plenty of that.  What I didn’t expect though was a suggestion that I’d never thought of before.  If I’d simply thought to compose my blog post outside of WordPress, all my hard work wouldn’t have been lost.

Part of the discussion went something like this:

“I’ve heard of that happening to other folks, so to keep from losing their work, they just compose articles in Google Docs.  Then when they’re finished, they can just cut and paste the article into WordPress.  Then, they have everything ready to go if they want to turn their blog into an e-book.”

It hit me like a load of bricks.  This bit of reasoning was pure genius, but it had never occurred to me.  After all, as long as I was saving my work from time to time, and as long as the software was using auto-save, I should have been golden, right?

That’s one of the things I love about collaboration, actually.  I’m a smart person and a good problem-solver, but I also recognize that I don’t have all the answers.  I like to use the Family Feud analogy.  When the host reads the question, a number of answers pop into my head.  When I hear a contestant’s answer — one that I hadn’t thought of — I think in an entirely different direction and come up with answers that wouldn’t have occurred to me without another person’s perspective.  And that’s what happened with my lost blog post.  My one problem turned into several solutions because I sought out others’ ideas and experiences.

So what am I going to do now? First, I’m NOT going to write blog posts in WordPress.  I’ll write them in Google Docs, and I’ll keep a copy in the cloud and on my own PC.  Then, I’ll cut and paste my content into a new post, and I’ll put the finishing touches on my post at that point.  Then I’ll publish my post, and I won’t worry about it.

Today, I felt like WordPress handed me a bunch of lemons when I discovered that my article had gone bye-bye.  By using my brain and collaborating with others though, I was able to turn those lemons into some pretty spectacular lemonade! What we do matters, folks.  Don’t ever forget that!