I just wrote a lengthy post about the interesting virtues of JotSpot and XaraOnline, hit the Preview link, and then my browser’s Back button to go back to the editor.
Alas, going “Back” in Blogger’s editor preview doesn’t go back to the editor, it goes back to the previous page. Going forward to get back to the editor then erases all of your work, so the post I wrote is no more. Argh.
I don’t feel like rewriting it now, so now you get to read this gripe instead. Blame Blogger, and take these cautionary notes for web application design:
- “Reload” shouldn’t double anything, even on POST forms!
- “Forward” shouldn’t erase anything or redo anything
- “Back” must always take you back
- “Back” must never break anything
In other words, you must never ever, ever punish a user for clicking on standard browser navigation buttons. And yet, I regularly go to sites for companies with a $22 billion market cap, that have messages like “Don’t hit reload, cause it’ll pay your bill twice.” Stupid, stupid, stupid.
How hard is it to put a hidden field in the form with a transaction number so you can tell it’s the same freaking submission? Or just to check if someone’s trying to pay more than they owe, after figuring in all pending payments? The US Postal Service site does this nonsense too. It also gives dire warnings about using the Back button. Couldn’t they find anybody who knows better?
(It’s probably actually an artifact of how software gets done in large companies, i.e., there was nothing in the requirements about it, nobody listened to the UI group, QA reported a bug, and development fixed it via the path of least resistance: by putting up a message and not actually changing anything. Oh well.)
And now, I’m going to click on “Save as Draft” in the Blogger editor before I use “Preview”. You’d think after the other half-dozen times I lost posts to this stupid editor, I’d have learned. Unfortunately, it’s just too engrained in my head how links and “back” are supposed to work. And it’s probably just as deeply embedded in your users’ heads, too.
Hi,
I work on Blogger. I will file this as a bug with a high priority. What browser do you use?
Best,
Steve
Firefox 0.8, Windows.
Note that a simple solution (IMO) would be to display the edit preview in a popup window. Then, I would never hit the back button by reflex to get “back” to editing, because I’d just close the popup.
I say this because even if I didn’t lose the post, it would still annoy me every time I hit back from the preview and ended up somewhere other than the edit screen. So, a popup would be better from a task-continuity perspective.
In later versions of Firefox, if you click on the back button while viewing Preview, you’ll get a dialog saying that you’re going to wipe out your post. I’m not sure why this isn’t working with 0.8 but it does work for us in 1.0 (which was finally released today!).
Again, I’m sorry for the trouble. Feel free to let me know if you have more problems.
I’m on the paranoid side whenever I click “submit” after writing a long post on a web application: I select the whole text and copy it to the system clipboard. Then if I get a silly error message or the post disappears due to clicking “back”, I can paste the text again. 🙂
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Hi, although I didn’t lose my post like you did, mine just kind of disappeared… It was a long one and I liked it, it was my 3rd post on my newly created Blog. Do you know any way of retrieving it? I would think it’s a database problem because I didn’t edit the said post or anything. Just clicked on “republish” a lot of times because Blogger would refuse to show me the changes (and yes, I tried the cache deletion). Oh well. Gotta love technology.
firefox rules