Auto-Save For Authors
Ever write an article within the submission interface instead of copying and pasting from a text editor or word?…and then LOSE your article because your browser crashed or you lost Internet access or your computer shut down? Brand new feature introduced this week called AUTO-SAVE is here to save the day…
First, this feature is only available on the Beta membership site till the middle of June 2006.
The autosave timer starts by either editing or creating a draft:
On a New Article Submission: Selecting *draft save* will create a draft of the current work, start the save timer, and the draft becomes the current ‘working’ document.
Editing an existing draft: The edited draft is the working document, and the timer starts right away.
Editing an existing non draft document: Selecting draft save copies the current document to a Draft version and starts the timer. Saves are done to the draft copy created during that session.
The AUTOSAVE timer is currently defaulted to 10 minutes to limit the amount of database resources needed for this function. There is a possibility in the future for the number of minutes to become user-definable.
The next phase of this new feature will be a count-down timer that will tell you when autosave will activate.
Lastly, I need to make this very clear: We’re not responsible if you lose your new article because this new feature failed as there are no guarantees it will work perfectly for everyone. Hey, it’s something new we’re testing. Think of this feature as a loss-mitigation tool that we’re adding to help the many authors who write their article within the interface.
Personally, I think it’s much safer idea to write the article in MS Word or a text editor, SAVE IT on your local hard drive, and then upload it to your EzineArticles membership interface. :-)…but, I hope this new AutoSave function will save countless hours of work that are lost due to technology problems for those who don’t have saved/backed-up copies of their articles.
What do you think of this new AutoSave feature?
New features everytime I turn around here. I prefer writing off line and was thinking it would be nice if I could paste multiple articles on my clipboard, dump them on the membership submission page, then cut and paste each one. Then I figured Windows probably would allow me to do something similar but I don’t know Windows very well. An article dump like this would save me about three minutes per article and I only submit a few at a time, so it is not an important thing for me.
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