Typepad Timeouts are Ugly

<rant>

Today’s Typepad service outage showed some clumsy handling. From Mashup Camp this morning, I retired the content on my home page, wrote a post, and then clicked Save. Of course, this was right when Typepad went offline, so Typepad sent me to a "system down" page without saving the post I had just written.

Um, how about giving me the error message via a new window or a popup instead, rather than compounding bad service by changing the live window and trashing my work? (And no, clicking ‘back’ in your browser window will not return you to your edited post form; it brings you back to an empty post form. Gee, thanks.) Some people must have it even worse.

</rant>

That’s the rant. More graceful crash handling, please. There’s no reason to leave users unprotected from data loss. We should be able to trust your online editor for online editing.

Tags: christine herron christine.net space jockeys typepad technology

Comments

[Christine]

I actually did try that workaround - someone else at Mashup Camp suggested it - but there wasn't any invisible cache for my Typepad post form. The problem may have been that I didn't receive an error page - the Typepad service actually redirected me to the official service status page.

[Derek Scruggs]

Oftentimes in situations like this you can just reload the current error page. If the browser gives you a waring about having to refresh post data, that means your form data is still "in" the browser and it will be re-submitted.

That said, one trick I learned the hard way is to get in the habbit of using ctrl-a & ctrl-c to copy large text fields to the clipboard buffer before submitting. Like this comment.

Hmmm... Someone should write a Firefox extension to auto-save this data to disk in the worst case scenario.