Since starting the experiment to replace iA Writer on my phone homescreen with a link to the Journal I can honestly say that I haven't used it once. I've put the odd note here and there in Google Keep but, beyond that, everything has been going in the Journal or, if more in depth, in the Garden.
Spending 99% of my time writing in textareas in the browser I wondered about creating some kind of rudimentary autosave feature. I'm not too proud to admit that I have, on occasion, accidentally hit refresh or closed the wrong tab thus losing what I have been writing.
Wondering what would be the simplest way to do this I decided on periodically setting a cookie with the contents of the textarea (as long as it's not empty) and then checking for it when the post form loads. If it exists the form is populated with whatever has been stored. When submitting a post the cookie is then deleted leaving is clear for the next time.
I currently have the cookie expiry set to an hour but may change this if I find it's too long or too short, depending on the circumstances.
