I’ve been using the mostly cool blogging firefox extension by performancing.com for at least 8 months now. There are a few irritations I have with the editor however for the most part these are issues I have with many formatted text editors out there (for instance when linking some text there is no obvious way to stop applying the link formatting – I always have to apply links last to get around this) so I am forgiving on these matters.

What I occured on Friday though was more than irritating, it cost me a detailed post. I was linking for somewhere to paste the links I was collecting for pasting on text once I finished drafting my post. I remembered a ‘Notes’ tab in the Performancing editor and thought I might be able to post it there. That would be conveniant. I saw two example “Notes” in there and clicked on one to see where it would let me input my Note. The text in the main editor was replaced with the text from the Note. Neat! I thought, I can switch between my draft and my notes right here in the editor! Now, how to switch back to my draft? 30 minutes of hunting around the interface and the forums brought me to the slow realisation that my work of earlier in the day was lost.

Why name something destructive with the innocuous title of “Notes”? Why not warn of non-obvious, destructive behaviour? The irony is that I am now using this feature to protect me from an event like this – I just have to remember to click ‘Save as Note’ first or suffer a similar event. I am, of course, now in the market for a good blog editor which will combine well with my web browser research on a single screen (for when I am using the laptop free of my second screen).

My silver lining is that events like these help create a stronger usability movement.

A new version of my original post is on its way – its taken a few days to build up to retyping it.

Stumble it!