Ping (zestyping) wrote,
Ping
zestyping

Autosave your form fields.

Bam! I just lost 45 minutes of writing into a stupid LiveJournal textarea. I hate that. I decided i hated it enough to go looking for some sort of autosave feature for Firefox forms.

There's a nice extension called Scribe that lets you save your form contents into a file. But it didn't do the trick for me, for two reasons:
  1. It only works for Firefox 1.0, and refuses to install if you have Firefox 1.5.
  2. To save your form, you have to go File > Save Entry..., then a file dialog pops up and you have to navigate to where you want to save your file, type in a filename... blah blah blah. There's no way i'd be conscientious enough to do that every few minutes.
So i downloaded Scribe, unpacked it, and fixed these two things (for some definition of "fixed"). I have a hacked-up version that installs in Firefox 1.0 or 1.5, and if you tell it to, it will save whatever you've entered in your form automatically every minute. To use it, install scribe.xpi, then in the Tools > Extensions window, select Scribe and click "Preferences". Check the "autosave" option and enter the path to a directory where you want it to save your form contents.

Be warned: this is a quick and dirty hack, and it does not delete old files! You may end up with a lot of little files piling up in that directory after a while. But that's better than losing work, i think.

(And yes, i know there are clients for LiveJournal that can autosave. I don't want one.)
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