Draft post wiped (ecto3.0b44)

[bedroomation]

I had typed out a very, very long draft blog post, only to have it all disappear when switching between HTML editor and Rich Text. I'm pretty sure my HTML had closed itself OK, but as my post is gone it's pretty hard to replicate.

No undo function was available to me at this point. I decided to quit the application without saving anything, thinking that at least ecto would restore the last save point. On restarting ecto, I found that the draft post was still empty. I found the File > Restore Revision... sub-menu, but nothing came up.

I'm posting to a WP2.5 install. Saving, so far, has only stored about three paragraphs in draft form on my server database. The rest, I assume, was saved locally.

Is there anything that comes to mind that would allow me to restore my post? I paid money for ecto and don't feel inclined to use it again if I can't get this post restored. I don't mind raiding log/temp files!

Thanks in advance.

[adriaan]

Is the draft not listed in the main window's listing? Did you save while editing? If you did, it should be there and there should be a File->Revision list when you open it. Very odd. You can mail me an archive with ~/Library/Application Support/ecto3 and I'll try to find it if you provide me with some key words or sentences you had written. Mail it to adriaan AT neoteny.com

Note that I'm away for the weekend, so may not be able to look at it until I get back.

[bedroomation]

Thanks for getting back. I think the reason I couldn't access the revision list was that when I re-opened ecto I had only selected the post in question (which was there in the list - just the text was wiped), I just hadn't opened it up. So I suppose I just wasn't thinking clearly. I think there's still a bug there when switching from Rich Text to HTML Editor (I hadn't done anything obvious like Select All and Delete - if I had, my text change would have been reversible by Undo). But I have managed to restore the majority of my draft.

I really appreciate you offering to go through the app data files! I'm very happy to continue using ecto.

A UI suggestion: I don't think I'd have concluded ecto had lost all revisions of my draft if File > Restore Revision... hadn't appeared active while I had the main post list window in focus. I had moused onto it and no sub-menu had appeared, so I interpreted that as a loss of data. In this context, could Restore Revision be greyed out instead?

[ahrencode]

This happened to me last night. I am using the latest Ecto3 (at time of writing this note) on Mac OS X 10.5 and I am posting to a WordPress 2.x blog. I wrote a fairly long post, with images included, and attempted to publish it to my blog which was running 2.7.x. That failed with a parse error. Things got suspicious even before that: the "preview" window was coming up empty even though the editor window had all the text and images in it. This prompted me to keep saving my Draft, but as you will see below, that didn't save me. Back to the story: after the parse error, for various reasons I upgraded my WP to 2.8 and then brought up Ecto again in order to attempt my post again. Horror of horrors! My draft was completely empty except for the title. Text, markup, images, category/tag selections were all gone. The revisions option in the File menu was empty as well.

I rooted around in ~/Application Support/ecto3 (I installed the new Ecto as ecto3 to avoid conflict with the older 2.0 version which I wanted to keep around), and ~/Library/Caches/ecto3, to no avail. I can see other drafts in one or the other of these directories, but no luck finding my long draft from last night.

At this point, I am guessing I am SOL (my last hope is Time Machine which I will attempt shortly), but I am posting here in the hope that someone authoritative might just have a clue.

[ahrencode]

At this point, I am guessing I am SOL (my last hope is Time Machine which I will attempt shortly), but I am posting here in the hope that someone authoritative might just have a clue.

Time Machine didn't help, unfortunately, since my draft was created and lost entirely within a window of the backup schedule. Interestingly, even though Ecto ate up the text, I found the images I attached to my post at ~/Library/Application Support/Ecto3/Cache. Which is not much of a relief since I have those images (screenshots) saved elsewhere as well. Would have much rather have Ecto lose the images and give me my text back!

[danbrekke]

I'm using Ecto 3 (not sure which build) on Mac OS X -- 10.5.7 -- publishing to Typepad. However, the problem I'm experiencing occurs before publishing: The body of posts, which are saved and appear normal in the editor's rich text view, simply vanishes upon publishing. This has happened twice in the last week, and I haven't detected a pattern. This morning I noticed that the preview of a post I was writing was blank (a symptom also reported elsewhere in this thread); switching to HTML view, it too was blank; and when I went back to rich text, the post had vanished from there as well.

Any help out there? Until last week, I had never seen this happen; now it's becoming a feature. FWIW, I've used Ecto for years and have about 2,000 posts saved. I have noticed a slowdown in loading recently and have wondered whether it's connected to the volume of material saved.

[ahrencode]

I'm using Ecto 3 (not sure which build) on Mac OS X -- 10.5.7 -- publishing to Typepad. However, the problem I'm experiencing occurs before publishing: The body of posts, which are saved and appear normal in the editor's rich text view, simply vanishes upon publishing. This has happened twice in the last week, and I haven't detected a pattern. This morning I noticed that the preview of a post I was writing was blank (a symptom also reported elsewhere in this thread); switching to HTML view, it too was blank; and when I went back to rich text, the post had vanished from there as well.

This is pretty much what was happening to me. I have stopped using Ecto for now and am using the built-in editor on my WP site.

[danbrekke]

One other thing that I'd add: Although the body of my posts were lost, the title survived. So when I published, the posts appeared in my blogs with titles ("headlines") only; the body was missing, just as it was in the Ecto version.

[mikelwood]

I had the same problem. I wrote a long post in WYSIWYG view, and when I switched over to HTML to add some tags my text vanished! This has now happened about five times, and I'm about to have to drop Ecto! =(

I'm running Mac OS X 10.5.7 on a MacBook, publishing to my self-hosted WordPress blog.

mlwj

[ahrencode]

I had the same problem. I wrote a long post in WYSIWYG view, and when I switched over to HTML to add some tags my text vanished! This has now happened about five times, and I'm about to have to drop Ecto! =(

I am in the same boat. I have been looking at Blogo recently, which is nice, but I notice that for anything complicated (like getting two images to float left or right), nothing but HTML editing works in any of these editors.

Like @danbreke, I too had the experience where the titles were retained but the text disappeared. I looked hard through my home directory, using find/grep/etc but could find no trace of the post text.