maximum length
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I don’t know when this happened, but it might have been when my browser crashed. However, I keep my page saved.
This particular page is currently over 16,000 words long. What happened is that all of the paragraphing disappeared unless it was part of a section that was broken up by titles and
<ul>s or
<ol>s. I prefer to keep this as one page, thought if there’s a built-in maximum number of words per page, I can break it down. It’s just that the links need to connect the top, the bottom, and everything else.Is this just a glitch that probably won’t happen again, or is this something that will happen regularly when I’m building a page this long?
Cougar
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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In the above, I didn’t see the instructions to place
<ol>and<ul>in between backtick ( ` ) characters. Sorry. This is why the two above indents occurred. -
Hi there!
There isn’t technically a maximum length for a page. However, once the pages get too long they start to lag when you load them and you’ll start to see glitches like this one. You could try using Pagination?
http://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/nextpage/
Or breaking the page up into several smaller pages will also work.
Let me know if you have any more questions!
(I’ll edit your post to fix the formatting. :)
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Things are still screwing up royally. After breaking up my long post into five shorter posts and saving them as drafts, I discovered that one of them, that I had worked on at length, was missing in the morning. It had been lost entirely.
Fortunately, I had taken two precautions. Earlier, I had saved the text version in MS Word, which had everything up until that point, including all of the links, many of which needed to be updated because of splitting the files, but still, it was a record.
So I could recreate an earlier version of the missing file. In addition, I had opened a preview version of missing doc, and when I hibernated my Windows, I didn’t close it. So I have an up-to-date version to use for re-editing the missing file as I put it back. It will still cost me several hours of work, and now I don’t trust my previous edits on the other files. I’m going to have to go back and recheck everything.
Your entire system is screwing up in some way. As a “Happiness Engineer,” you should know I ain’t happy.
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I’m sorry that happened. :( I don’t see any record of one of those pages being deleted in our logs. Are you able to get it all back the way you wanted? I can try to dig in deeper and see if I can find a cache of the draft for you.
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Well, before going to bed last night, I went through and resaved every one of the five pages I have to have open to work on this. The page that disappeared has a permalink of
http://claritycommunity.org/master-self-hypnosis-pt-3/
(For everyone else, it’s not ready for prime time yet, and won’t be for a while.)Currently, I don’t trust your system. I’m going to have to go back to all of the links that I edited in pt-1 and pt-2 to make sure that they’re also not reverted to the originals from before I split the file. (i.e., a link to #ConversationTrance in pt-1 has to be now confirmed as pointing to http://claritycommunity.org/master-self-hypnosis-pt-3/#ConversationTrance, etc.) Since my original document was thoroughly linked within itself, this is a tremendously huge amount of work, just to reconfirm that things are the way I left them last night.
And SAVED them, to repeat what I’m certain that I did. I even have the preview version that I had used to confirm all of my work before quitting still open in the hibernated browser. The fact that this preview version worked and is still present proves that I had saved the file last night, because otherwise, I wouldn’t have had the preview version to test.
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I’m sorry that you’ve had to reconstruct your work. Usually these things end up being an overwritten page, which is easily restored. Since you had a preview of the post available, that should have saved the draft even if you hadn’t specifically saved it.
Since you’re restored the work, there’s not much I can do to dig into what caused this. Please let me know if there’s something I can help with or if this happens again.
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I don’t know how it happened, though I was saving drafts which have their own internal file name. However, I gave each one a unique file name as a Permalink, and when I used a preview of file one to access each of the other files using their Permalinks, it worked, indicating that the Permalink was unique and checked. So if two drafts were being saved with identical internal file names that I had no direct knowledge of or way of checking, it might have caused the problem. I personally thought that setting the Permalink was my only responsibility.
Today, because of this hypothesis, I saved them all as private published pages, and I’m not happy with the appending of Private to the title. I assume that might go away when I make them public, but otherwise, it’s another manual task that I have to make sure to remember.
If it happened because of me, it’s because I tried to use the option that I can no longer see, which was to use another page as a template. The instructions for that option are very scant, and if my intuitive understanding of how to do that was incorrect, it’s because of inadequate information on that option. I believe in step-wise instructions, rather than just throwing something on the page without any.
I understand technology at a higher level than most, and if I screwed up on that option, I’m sure that it’s a danger for others.
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So if two drafts were being saved with identical internal file names that I had no direct knowledge of or way of checking, it might have caused the problem. I personally thought that setting the Permalink was my only responsibility.
Yep! And if you had published the page with the same exact title without editing the permalink, you would have had a “-2” appended to the end so that the two pages were not referenced identically.
I’m not happy with the appending of Private to the title. I assume that might go away when I make them public, but otherwise, it’s another manual task that I have to make sure to remember.
The “Private” label appended to the titles will go away once the page is no longer private. We do that to make it clear that you’re looking at a private post.
If it happened because of me, it’s because I tried to use the option that I can no longer see, which was to use another page as a template.
Copying a page using our tool copies the content of that page into the current draft. It does not affect the original page. I think this is what you assumed would happen as well.
The instructions included in the editor are:
Use an existing page as a template. Pick a post and we’ll copy the title and content.
Do you think there’s something specific we need to clarify there?
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I only tried to use it once, because I was trying to clone my long piece so that I could divide it into two and then delete parts of each. But it was a disaster. I don’t even know how to recreate it, because the feature isn’t available on any of my current pages.
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I’ve done it all manually, since, copying and pasting into individual new pages. I broke the original into five, but I don’t like the way they’re developing in terms of comparable lengths, but I couldn’t predict that. (Some of the new ones are starting to get long.)
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I don’t even know how to recreate it, because the feature isn’t available on any of my current pages.
That’s actually a great use of the “Copy a Page” function. Sorry it disappeared for you. :(
Try clicking on “Screen Options” in the upper right corner of the editor. There should be a check box there for “Writing Helper”. Check that box and the “Copy a Page” function should return.
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The confusion for me is: do I open a new page and find something to copy into it, or do I start with the page I want to copy. I don’t want to play with it now, but that’s what screwed me up. I think the text provided doesn’t provide a clue about that question.
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The confusion for me is: do I open a new page and find something to copy into it, or do I start with the page I want to copy.
You open a new page, and find something to copy into it. I’ll pass along the point of confusion to the team.
Thanks for sticking with me on this and clarifying your confusion. :)
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I acknowledge you as well for continuing to stick with me, to ask me questions, and to follow the thread to the end. That’s not common in support. In addition, I acknowledge myself for staying positive, for being willing to explain my frustration, and for reexamining what was the problem until I had communicated it effectively.
In our Clarity Community circles, we always end by acknowledging everyone else, and then acknowledging ourselves. Each person does this. So what’s missing for me in this conversation is that you didn’t acknowledge yourself. What do you acknowledge yourself for in this situation?
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What a great practice! I studied communication and conflict resolution in school and I absolutely love tools like this.
As I mentioned, I acknowledge you for sticking with me and clarifying your confusion. I know that can be a tall order when it feels like your technology betrays you. I acknowledge myself for hearing your frustration and continuing to dig into the issue you were having rather than writing it off.
I admit, I didn’t always know exactly what was going wrong with your pages, but I’m really glad we were able to work it all the way through.
Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with. :)
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FYI Shawna,
After all our discussion, when I decided to try to do the same maneuver again, the same thing happened.
I created 2 new files with these file names: http://claritycommunity.org/master-self-hypnosis-pt-5/
http://claritycommunity.org/master-self-hypnosis-pt-6/(These were copied from http://claritycommunity.org/master-self-hypnosis-pt-4.)
But these two ended up having the same internal code, and if I saved pt-6, it would overwrite pt-5. Eventually, I had to create an entirely new file, which wordpress would not accept under the original name. Here’s how it ended up being named:
http://claritycommunity.org/master-self-hypnosis-pt-5-2/
This necessitated me going through the entire seven-part document and doing a search in the html/text view for pt-5 to manually find and change all of the links throughout the document for anything that pointed to this file.
Incidentally, this last change in file number for this document was prophylactic. I’m foreseeing the final document as growing to the size that I would want this number of divisions, though I’m not certain.
I didn’t choose to use the pagination method because that still involves using the same size page, which wouldn’t theoretically protect me from the loading lag time that destroyed my original document’s formating. It simply changes things at presentation time, not at authoring time. The destruction happened during authoring time, not presentation time.
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Hmm. When you say “these two ended up having the same internal code”, can you tell me what you mean by that?
We have checks in place to make sure that a new page (which is given a separate id number) won’t overwrite an existing one, either in the admin interface or from the front end of your site. The id number let’s us “know” that the two pages aren’t actually the same.
I haven’t been able to recreate the issue you’re describing. Here are the steps I’m taking:
- Open the page editor to create a new page.
- Open the “Copy a Page” tool at the bottom of the editor.
- Search for my test page w/ content “long content test”.
- Select “long content test” to copy into my new page.
- Edit the title to “long content test (pt. 2)”.
- Save as a draft.
At the end, I have a page with the slug long-content-test and a page with the slug long-content-test-pt-2.
(Also, just a heads up, parts 5 and 6 are currently published publicly. I know the rest of your pages are private, so I thought you might want to update those two.)
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I don’t know how to duplicate it. Maybe it’s a glitch in Opera, which is my choice of browser because of it’s light footprint. I just know that I was trying to use all of the advice I received, and somehow, it didn’t work. I ended up having two files published with different permalinks that overwrote one another. I ended up having to copy from my word doc backup of the html/text view into an entirely new page, which is the pt-5-2 page, because in the process of trying to correct the previous problem, I ended up wiping out one of the pages entirely.
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:( I really don’t know why this is happening.
Are you using version 27 of Opera? That seems to be the latest. Are you having other connection issues? Getting timeout errors when you visit websites, or seeing lot of broken images?
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