Hard to find draft blogs

I was working on a blog yesterday. I couldn't complete it yesterday so I saved it as draft. Today it took me almost 30 mins to find the draft. It seems like only when you try to to start a new blog you can access the drafts.
One other thing I noticed it, If you want to create a blog on say open source hardware you have to go to "Technologies" and then select "open source hardware" and then create a blog. I feel it should be much more intuitive if you can create a blog from the landing page and select the technology or forum from a drop down.

Top Replies

shabaz 10 months ago

Top tip, it's best to write your draft offline, in (say) MS Word. And then paste it all in when complete. The site is actually not bad in retaining drafts even when there's a broken Internet connection for instance, but I still think it's better all round to prepare in Word first. It's easier to edit and organise stuff in a tool like Word, than online editors.
Cancel
Vote Up +2 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
Andrew J 10 months ago in reply to shabaz

Does it remove embedded Word control codes when you paste it in? I had many a problem with that with Oracle’s CM system - we had to write our own routine to walk the DOM stripping stuff out. Still, it’s a good tip to follow, although I just use a simple text editor out of habit from that problem.
Cancel
Vote Up +1 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
aswinvenu 10 months ago in reply to shabaz

Agreed, But my point was if there is a draft section I think it should be available much more easily. Let's say if you go under the profile and blogs. I feel in the current design it's kinda hidden.
I was using open office writer primarily to organize the blogs. But when it comes to formatting the blog it became extra work. That's why I thought of writing it online.
A year back dougw posted a forum post on the same. That saved my time today!
Thanks to dougw for that
Cancel
Vote Up +1 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
aswinvenu 10 months ago in reply to aswinvenu

community.element14.com/.../lost-draft-of-a-design-challenge-blog
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
shabaz 10 months ago in reply to Andrew J

I think it's supposed to preserve headings, but actually I do the same as you. After the content is written in Word and I'm happy with it, then I copy-paste into Notepad, and then copy-paste from there into the website. (I'm sure Word allows a direct unformatted copy but I don't know the magic presses, so Notepad will do!). And then insert photos to match what I had in the Word doc, and then go through each paragraph, pressing backspace then Enter so that paragraphs are recognised by the site editor, then setting the headings. Tedious, but better than typing and editing it entirely in the site editor.
Cancel
Vote Up +1 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
kmikemoo 10 months ago in reply to shabaz

I have to make a STRONG second of shabaz recommendation to write offline. While writing the final blog for Experimenting with Industrial Automation, I inserted a video clip that Verint absolutely didn't like. I could not get back into my draft. I could see it and was able to recreate the write-up with screen copy/paste, but it was a pain. If I had an offline copy, things would have happened faster (maybe not at all because I had a backup).
Cancel
Vote Up +2 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
Workshopshed 4 months ago

I failed to find my drafts and ended up at this article
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
dougw 4 months ago in reply to Workshopshed

If the pen doesn't work, sometimes there is an edit link over in the right hand side panel....
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
dang74 4 months ago in reply to kmikemoo

I second that. (Or third that in this case)
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel