Phil Gyford

Writing

Monday 5 May 2003

PreviousIndexNext Two reasons to avoid using Safari with Movable Type

Having finally settled on using Safari as my standard web browser, I’ve now discovered two reasons not to use it when editing weblogs using Movable Type. The first is very bad…

  1. If you go to the “Search Entries” page in Movable Type, enter a term to search for and hit Return on your keyboard you’re in trouble. The form has two submit buttons: “Search” and “Replace”. This is a bad thing in web forms, but, as far as I know, most browsers cope by defaulting to searching when you hit Return. Safari defaults to replacing. So, when you casually strike Return to look for something, you’re actually replacing every instance of the string with whatever is in the “Replace with” field; probably nothing. There is no undo. Ouch.
  2. On Pepys’ Diary each entry has a lot of Trackback pings; saving a new entry can result in more than a dozen pings to the contents of the Background Info section (actually a second weblog). This can take minutes, but Safari times out after 60 seconds. This means some or all of the pings have been sent but (I assume) not all the acknowledgments have been received. If you wonder what’s gone wrong, and try again, you’ll send the pings a second time, resulting in multiple Trackbacks on the linked-to site. Camino seems more forgiving and waits longer.

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