SquareSpace editor: a few bugs and no error recovery make me very sad
20091222 at 14:02 UPDATE: Hi there and thanks! to the excellent SquareSpace engineers
I’m very happy to see the problems that most concerned me fixed.
The last time I opened an issue it was just to mention a Ukranian spammer I could see coming from a mile off, and to wonder how to better deter him. On the about page I’ve listed several translations of a warning message — imagine if the appropriate warning message should appear if he lands on a comment form via a Ukranian google search. Flashing red. Regardless, it was not really a bug — but I was thanked for my input. I think I’ve been “whitelisted.”
Also, another strange problem that caused serious failures and then included a stack trace, was reported back to SquareSpace and acted upon within hours.
Great work, SquareSpace! The post is left for historical interest only.
I’m trying to write a post and various problems keep getting in the way. Above, I was editing a list of “required reading” posts and the editor got confused, so I tried “remove formatting.” I’ve noticed that HTML markup crud accumulates sometimes, and this is often the easiest way to get the editor back on track. Unfortunately, remove formatting has a terrible bug, and shouldn’t be used on an aribitrary selection — in this case I probably needed to carefully select the entire list. My bad… start over.
The problem is, I was specifically doing short-turn-around editing. This follows a support ticket I submitted today regarding the lack of error recovery in the editor. If logic errors in the code result in infinite loops (forever do something useless) it freezes the brower and you have no hope of recovery, unless “auto-save” managed to save your data. I’ve been informed SqareSpace engineers are working on “auto-save.”
I should probably follow the lead of other bloggers of note — and edit direcly in HTML. Offline. And post the draft by email. Feh.
Previous support ticket:
I have lost hours of edits due to several problems with the WYSIWYG editor. At the very least could you please add an option to create a local version of the post should “save” fail. Or, provide revision access via the “change log”. At least provide multiple in-progress revisions until the first “Publish” These problems together add up to lost hours of work on my part. I can elaborate if needed.
There are many instances where I lost content. The most recent was “permission denied” when trying to save after a long editing session. The “login” had expired, I think. Regardless, the work I have in the editor should be given top priority W.R.T. error recovery.
You don’t need to know what exactly I was doing; The fact remains you have no recovery method for “save” failure. What if my internet connection died? Same problem. After the failure, the editor was refreshed with the post’s previous content. EXACTLY THE WRONG ANSWER. I’m trying to save something that is local to the browser!
[suggestion to copy/paste the content to “notepad” before saving]
The problem is one doesn’t know ahead of time when failure will occur. So, copy/paste out is a bit too much to ask. I have boiled the problem down to a damning series of steps:
1. Login
2. Create post in separate editor window “failure test” content “save me”
3. Logout
4. Save post
5: Result: “Access denied” and editor contains nothing
richardwalker