You know, there’s nothing worse than working on a blog post, doing a lot of formatting on it, then losing your wireless connection a few moments before you click on the Save button - and thus losing the formatting you just did. WordPress has an auto-save feature, but it doesn’t kick in often enough for my liking. I can’t find any reference to how often it auto-saves, nor is there any option I can find that would allow me to change the frequency. Word has an auto-save function as well, but even in the 2007 version it defaults to 10 minutes. I don’t know about you, but I think most people can do a lot of typing in 10 minutes and if you lose your work after nine minutes, you’re going to wonder why it wasn’t doing it every three minutes (I usually go in and change the default in Word to three minutes). Since WordPress is software running on my server, using my resources, why can’t I set it to auto-save my post every 60 seconds if I wanted to? I’m really impressed with WordPress overall as a CMS, but I’m often baffled by certain aspects of it (such as not being able to change the thumbnail size, or making the default image insertion full size and no link).

Here’s another one of those posts that are simply search engine fodder: I’m using Windows Mail, the replacement for Outlook Express, on my small laptop for my personal email. I find it easier to fire up one program, configured just with my personal email, than to start up Outlook and have hundreds of messages flood in from my seven (!!!) different email accounts. What surprised me tonight though was how hard it was to find something seemingly very simple: I was sending an email from Windows Mail, and I wanted to include a BCC (blind carbon copy) recipient. I started looking in the menus for the email I was working on - I looked under View, expecting to see BCC there. It wasn’t. I searched through every menu in the message itself, and even in the Windows Mail options. There wasn’t a single mention of BCC. From my email, I selected Help > View Help and typed in the term “BCC”. Not a single result. What?? I then tried “blind carbon copy”, a term that most people will not understand (average users know it only as BCC) and found 30 results. The first five included help topics on eliminating duplicate files, copy and paste from a remote computer, rip music FAQ, copy a file or folder, and copy information between files. Absolutely nothing on BCC.

I then tried Google and after a bit of searching, found the solution: with an email message open, click on View then All Headers and the BCC field will magically appear. All Headers? That’s completely, totally, and utterly non-intuitive. Who the hell knows that headers relates to BCC other than SMTP geeks more hardcore than I? Not cool at all - Vista, you lose a point in my books for this. The Windows Mail team needs to give their head a shake and change that to “View BCC”.