Comments nightmare

The blog commenter's nightmare is when, having penned a trenchant, indeed mordant comment to someone's post, you try to send it only to have Haloscan or Blogger eat it up. The second version is never quite as good. PJ has been so kind as to place a warning notice on her comments box, but it still happens.

Well, not any more. Not to me. I commented on a post yesterday at the ever-controversial Ultrablog. Then I went back to the same post today to see how the discussion was faring, and when I opened up the comments box, my typed-in text was still there! Before I could comment again, I had to clear the screen. And this is after closing down and starting up again today. That's what I call treating your words with respect.

It's all down to a little add-on available to users of Firefox. You need to have Greasemonkey installed and enabled, and then you can look for a little Javascript script called Textarea Backup. That makes sure that text you key in to any input field on a web-page will be preserved. You'll also get a warning confirmation dialogue every time you try to leave a page where there's anything in an input field, to stop you clicking off and losing your text.

You can get Firefox here. Greasemonkey is here. And there are thousands of scripts available here, including the one mentioned.

If anyone's put off by the sound of all that, rest assured it couldn't be simpler. You click on the Install button and it's all done for you. That's the beauty of the Fox.