Lost a post

This is primarily a note to myself to punctuate the flow of this blog to reflect some history.

I’m disappointed that I managed to delete a post I had mostly composed. Sometimes, and usually for more difficult posts, I work offline in MSWord to compose my posts. The way WordPress works isn’t that helpful for posts that take a while to compose or when I need to do more research for the subject of the post. And in the case of my lost post I was doing a lot of background research.

Previously I’d complained (in other contexts) about losing posts or especially comments in WordPress. Since the text editor running in a browser can’t access the local file system no temporary saves can be made (for posts, but not comments, WordPress does some saves to its cloud). I’ve lost enough that way to have adopted working offline (which can do temp saves) but even that is subject to human error.

So, what the post was about was restaurants in Astorga (surprised to find so many) and a local dish that is quite popular and featured by many of those restaurants, cocina maragato. I had done a lot of research on all this which was contained in the incomplete post I lost (also the menu translations that were background source information for the post). So you can go look at Astorga yourself (via Google Maps) and start with this link for cocina maragato.

Then, poof, in too much of a hurry I deleted the entire post AND the multiple menus I’d extracted and analyzed. What happened was that in attempting to add a new menu strange stuff showed up when I pasted the content from the website into MSWord. So I thought I was reversing that paste but instead deleted all the text in the file. Later in the evening while doing shutdown of my computer I got the notification from MSWord whether I wanted to save or not and, stupidly, just said yes without checking what changes it was trying to save. Poof, now I have an entirely empty file that previously had been many pages long.

This was quite discouraging to lose hours of work so I’m doing this notification post to kind of purge my despair and thus get back to work again on menus. And then make some new real posts.