Testing Autosave

New Blogger recently imposed Autosave on bloggers using Google Blogger. Now Blogger automatically save a post you are preparing without you having to click "Save as draft". There were a number of problems, some of which were eventually ironed out. There are still some who are not happy about Autosave, including me who are pleading with Blogger to give us the option to turn Autosave off.

A blogger in the Google Blogger Help group recently gave the reason why he don't want the Autosave. He says he like to edit his old posts, play around it, rearrange it, etc. Previously, if he don't like the alterations, he just don't publish the post. Now whatever changes he makes to the old post get autosaved and overwrite his original post irrespective of whether he likes it or not. This to me is a very good reason why Blogger should give us the option to turn Autosave off. I have been given to understand that this has been conveyed to the Blogger team, but it is unlikely they are going to act on it.

Another thing I would like to know. What if we are editing a previously published post, and the post got autosaved. Will it be saved as a draft without us knowing? This is what I am going to test in this post. I am going to publish it, then edit it and leave the post editor window opened for some time and see what happens. Here goes.

Update 6.30pm 22 June 2007 GMT +8: I am now editing this post. I will leave it for a while (for quite a while just to make sure).

Update 9.30pm 22 June 2007 GMT +8: I have observed when preparing posts that after a while, a message "Autosaved at ...." appears to the right of the "Save as draft" button in the post editor page. However, up till now, I still see no such message:



I also right-click the "EDIT POSTS" tabs to get to the list of posts, and saw this post as still published, not saved as draft.



I am going to sleep and leave this post editor window opened till next morning to see if there is any change.

Update 4.59am GMT +8 23 June 2007. I still don't see the " autosaved at ..." message. Further, which I rigth-click on EDIT POSTS and chose "open in new tab", I see the post as published and not saved as draft. Further, when I right-click on VIEW BLOG, I saw that the passage "I am going to sleep and leave this post editor window opened till next morning to see if there is any change" was not published. Either Autosave is not working for this blog or there is something I do not know.

Update 11 July 2007: The parargraphs in the post editor are still nicely separated by line breaks with no <br /> tags in sight. So I really don't know when Blogger will leave your post (in EDIT HTML mode) in the post editor window alone, and when it will jumble it up into a whole "paragraphs" with <br /> to separate the paragraphs when displayed on the web. This will probably be the last time I check the post.

Conclusion: test inconclusive. Time permitting, I will try the same test in another Blogger account.