So last night, I had an incredible wave of creativity and began writing down post ideas in Smultron, a text editor on Mac, as fast as I could. I came up with over twenty different topics I wanted to write about, including a variety of sub-headings and questions I wanted to answer.

At the time, I just tacked it onto the open to-do list file that I had open, thinking all was well and good, until I decided to do a few other things. What happened next? My MacBook Pro decided to crash. Not one of those nice endless beach ball web browser is stuck kind of crashes, but instead, one of those darkened screens notifying me in multiple languages that I would now have to press and hold the power button to restart the computer kind of crashes.

This, unfortunately, meant that all of what I had wrote in the text editor, all of my wonderful ideas, were now gone. Had I written them in a draft in WordPress, the auto-save would have kept at least most of them. Had I put them in NeoOffice, I probably could have restored them as well, but instead, I put them in a basic text editor that doesn’t have an auto-save, nor any features to bring back my ideas.

Learn from my mistake, save often, or make sure to put your ideas somewhere that saves often for you.

Originally posted on January 17, 2008 @ 6:34 pm