Apologies
Some of you might have woken up this morning to a skeleton draft of a review of Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man. Last night I hit “publish” instead of “save.” Sorry! The review is written now and posted.
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Thank god that hasn’t happened to me (yet). When I think of some of the things I’ve written in draft reviews… *shudder*
I’m with Rob. I have this fear every time I am saving a draft that I’ll hit the wrong button. Sorry, Trevor, but I’m glad it happened to you not me. Then again, it is inevitable that I will make the same mistake eventually.
I did wonder what had happened, but figured it must be something like that.
I’ve put up entries before they had been finally checked, which can be a pain, I think you can take comfort that yours was obviously not yet ready – it’s worse if it’s 80% there in a way because it’s not so obvious it shouldn’t be up yet.
I’ve actually done this several times, usually with a post I’m working on over several days or months (I keep accidentally publishing my year in review of The New Yorker‘s short fiction!). Usually I know what I’ve done immediately and quickly take it down before it gets up on everyone’s RSS feeds. Alas, when the draft is up for an entire night, the oversight sticks in those RSS feeds forever! At least I didn’t publish it in a newspaper! I remember when I was working for a highschool and then college newspaper, I used to be terrified of sending a laid-out page to the printer with the words “Headline Here” or “Write caption here” somewhere on the page. Even worse, publishing those inside jokes we kids used to put in to make our copy-editors mad.
I’m sure you have some interesting stories from the professional world of publishing, Kevin.
Since you ask, Trevor, here are my two favorite “hot-type” stories:
1. When the linotype operator made a mistake, he had to finish the line to get the type out. That’s where “easdfgdfghjkl” etc. came into fashion. Then there was the guy who finished the page one story mistake with “fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck” and proceeded to take out the wrong line. The union did its job and we never discovered who had actually made the mistake.
2. Even better is that in the good old days pictures and large type were done on the “clichogrpah” and then put on the stone — the cichogrpah would only make images that went half way cross the page. This included the nameplate of the newspaper which ran across the top of page one. One day a somewhat (incompetent, drunk, we will never know) compositor turned “The Medicine Hat News” into “Hat News The Medicine” and no one noticed it until midway through the press run. Those of us who got the paper in Edmonton, some 400 miles away, were much amused.
So, putting up a draft post is hardly a hiccup in the overall scheme of things.
Hi Trevor,
You’re on WordPress right? What you need to do is to add a small plugin to your plugin directory (and activate it of course) called Are You Sure? What it does is simply bring up a confirmation box asking if you’re sure you want to publish.
It works a charm, and has saved me premature posting a few times.
Hope that helps
Rob
Thanks for the stories, Kevin! I definitely have it easy here. And thanks for the plugin recommendation, Rob. That sounds like just the ticket!
Here’s a good newspaper publishing snafu — Back in the day, we used to get reports from church ladies, to be published in the Exeter Times-Advocate. One week, there were six young people who joined the United Church in a “Confirmation” class. The headline in the paper read: Sex Confirmed at United Church.
Thanks for keeping this post alive with an additional snafu, Mary! I love them!