This is not the post I was intending to publish today as that one fell victim to an infuriating feature of Blogger behaviour so I was moved to write about this instead as a warning to others. I have a first-class honours degree in computer science and am currently studying for an MSc in the same subject so I am by no means the average novice user and I feel I am suitably qualified to comment on how stupid and dangerous this feature is, particularly as Blogger is intended to be a simple tool that can be used by people without high levels of computer literacy.
I'm sure everyone knows what Ctrl-Z does: it is a pretty much universal shortcut to undo your most recent change. That's all fine and very useful but Blogger's implementation of Ctrl-Z has another nasty little trick up its sleeve: if you press it again when there are no previous edits in the history, it deletes the entire content of the post to leave you with a blank page. This isn't documented anywhere and the one relevant post I could find dates back to 2011 so it's not a new problem. That's not what an undo function is for so why they have decided to implement this feature and what benefit it has is unclear, but combine it with the automatic saving that is turned on by default and you have a recipe for disaster. For novice users this can doubtless cause blind panic and extreme anger as they think "Oh my God, where did all my work go?!", and possibly drive them to stop blogging as a result.
So what happened? I started to edit the post, made a mistake and pressed Ctrl-Z to undo it, but the keypress must have registered twice and because there was only one edit in the history, BOOM, all my content was deleted by the second press. Before I had properly realised what happened, the autosave function ran and saved the now-blank page so all my hard work was gone for good. Caught off-guard by this unexpected behaviour, panicking and not fully realising what I had done, I didn't think to press Ctrl-Y to redo, but hoping this was just a glitch I closed the editor and reopened it, only to find the content had indeed disappeared. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't have any form of version control so the most recently saved version overwrites all previous ones and is the only version available, and there is no way to revert to a previous draft of an unpublished post.
I then had a thought: I had previewed the post yesterday, so the link to that preview should still be in my browser history. If I opened that link, I should at least be able to copy and paste its text back into the edit window. Unfortunately this won't work either as preview URLs contain a unique token that expires after a certain time, so trying to access the old preview just gives a 403 "Invalid security token" error and the content isn't visible. There seems to be no way round it: the post is gone forever and the only way to recover it is to type it out again, which frankly doesn't inspire confidence in Google as a provider of cloud services.
I honestly don't know what possessed Google to implement this non-standard and confusing Ctrl-Z behaviour but I implore them to remove it as it is counter-intuitive and has caught out so many users who have unwittingly lost material they had spent hours creating. The only glimmer of hope is that Google should be doing regular backups of Blogger data, but whether they would be willing to do a custom restore from this is quite another matter. In my view, since the data loss was caused by undesirable behaviour of their product, they should offer to restore it as a gesture of goodwill to appease frustrated users, but I very much doubt they would even consider it and their attitude would be "it's a free service, you get what you pay for".
Right, having vented my frustrations, I'm off to rewrite the post that got deleted. Let this be a warning: beware the mighty power of Ctrl-Z!
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