From da Vinci Concept

Tips to Keep from Losing Your Writing While Composing

There are two ways that you can easily lose your writing.
1. Physically lose the data:

• Lose your notebook
• Leave the data on a public computer where it can be stolen. To avoid this, see this tip.
  

2. Have the computer figuratively "eat" your data.

This document deals mostly with the second method.

Keeping your writing data safe from the machine

This site uses a user authentication scheme called session management. This means that after you login, a session is started, during which you can view and edit pages. Your login session will eventually time out if you don't interact with the webpage. This session length is has a default of 20 minutes. This allows you to use a public computer without compromising your account. However, please log out when finished for data security as this default may be changed to a longer session length at this time.

Do not rely on your web-browser to secure your writing compositions!

When writing and editing your posts please make sure that you are not relying on your web-browser software (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, etc. . ) to keep you from losing data. If you rely on these programs for data integrity you will likely lose your work! Therefore...

Use a separate word processing program to compose lengthy material

I often use a temporary file or even a Word Processing program (Open Office, Microsoft Word, notepad, TextEdit) to write and edit in if I know that I will be composing my posts for a significant length of time. This also has the additional benefit of providing you with built in spell checking and thesaurus features that are not currently implemented on the webpage.

Save your work often

When using your external program to compose your lengthy and information rich compositions always be sure to save often. When you are finished composing and have successfully submitted to the site and have verified that your submission was successful, then you may delete/remove your temporary document.

Use the 'Save page' and 'Edit' buttons

If you are using a public computer and do not have access to another program to do document editing then simply post a succinct note at the bottom of your post (. . . in process of composing. . .) and save your composition, and then edit it later. Submit and edit as many times as you need to. It is helpful to provide some note regarding this in the "summary" box below the edit box ("Working on this post in the library") and checking the "minor edit" box so that members reviewing the history won't be flooded with edits on one post.

Use the web-browser's 'Back' button:

If you ever find that you are editing and your session has timed out, in many cases you can click the 'Back' button of your web-browser. Depending upon the configuration of the web-browser your composition may still be in the browsers cache (short-term memory). Do not depend on this as the most common browsers do not support this feature. Of course, if the browser is not configured properly then you may have lost your composition entirely.

It is also important in this case that you do not continue browsing the website if you lose your composition because of a website timeout. Immediately use the 'Back' button and the history arrow next to the back button to find your post and retrieve its contents. (ie: cut and paste from the text-area into another program or new web-browser window where you are logged in.)