I assume there’s a setting I can change to help ensure that the next time I invest more than an hour in writing a post, I don’t lose it because of my login timing out.

And yes, I know that if I’d saved it as “closed” as I was writing it I could have saved at least some of it—but who thinks about such things when they’re composing Great Literature?  [/pompous @$$]

Well, you could enable cookies in the control panel instead of using session IDs.  Another solution would be to write your posts in notepad and copy and paste when you’re ready to publish.

See this new entry in the Knowledge-Blog.

Also, as Lynda mentions, if you change the Control Panel to only use cookies and not sessions then you won’t need to worry about timeouts.  Using both sessions and cookies adds some security, though.

Thanks both.

I’ve gotten into the habit of of doing “command-a”, “command-c” (select all > copy) before I post anything anywhere for fear of losing it.

Of course you can only “backup” one entry field this way

If you use firefox there is an extension called “scribe” that will let you save the contents of any textarea - it’s pretty neat.  I forget the url but should be easy to find. =)

After much thought, I decided that since I’m the only one who uses this computer, and I don’t leave it on when I’m away from home, I can afford to switch my sessions to cookies-only.

But thanks all for the suggestions.

Remember even if you do switch to cookies only, hitting the “logout” link will log you out even with cookies set, so that next visit you will have to login again, you will just not get logged out until you hit the logout link.

True—just like logging in to these forums.

There is related issue here: If you return to a page with form fields by using the Back button, most forms on an EE site do not retain what you’ve typed in. This is not universal browser behavior. Many of the sites I use allow me to hit the Back button and everything I’ve typed in is still there—a great relief when I’ve just composed something like McGehee. I assume it’s related to the meta tags and/or http headers that affect client-side caching(??) If so, would there be a problem with changing those tags/headers?