Textarea Cache

Friday, Mar 26, 2010

Fill out forms with confidence, knowing that Textarea Cache automatically saves the comments, blog posts, and other long text you enter and can easily recover it in case of power outages, crashes, and website errors.

It’s the night before the all-important April edition of your Year-Round Egg Decorators Club Newsletter has to be sent out. After last year’s mishap, you swore it would never happen again.

That fateful night is planted vividly in your memory: it was about 7 o’clock as you sat down at your computer, ready to tap into years of dyeing and decorating experience to write your featured column for the newsletter: Top Ten Tips for the Leporiphobic. After spending hours crafting and wordsmithing one of the finest, most motivational pieces you’ve ever produced, you leaned back in your chair with a smile and hit Publish.

Oh no, it can’t be! Your heart dropped and panic spread through your body as you realized you had forgotten to select the required clip art image to use in the article. It was too late now; the page had already loaded with the crushing, red error in bold: “You must select at least one clip art image. Please go back and try again.”

We all know what happens at this point. There’s a 50/50 chance your article will still be there when you go back. There’s only one way to find out if your hours of work are lost forever. Someone has to hit the Back button to reveal the fate of your masterpiece. You took a deep breath, hit Back, and stared at the empty text area. Where once was perfection now was a cursor jumping up and down, as if to mock your misfortune.

After all the heartbreak and trouble of last year, how could you forget the clip art a second time? Last year’s omission resulted in what one club member called “the worst newsletter since the hen strike of ’74″. Everything began to crash around you as you began to think of quitting the club, giving up on your monthly newsletter, and abandoning your dues-paying decorators.

Then it hit you like egg on a brick house. Textarea Cache, of course! It’s so easy to forget, tucked away in the statusbar of Firefox — always listening, waiting until you need it. You installed it after last year’s snafu to make sure your data was never lost again.

With the click of a button, your elusive egg essay has returned to life before your eyes. It looks like the newsletter will make it out on time after all, thanks to Textarea Cache!

Features:

  • Recover the last text from any text area box, even if the tab or window is closed or browser crashes
  • The 20 most recent text area entries will be saved
  • The saved entries can be cleared at any time
  • Install it BEFORE you need to use it. Textarea Cache can’t recover data from before it was installed.

Post from Justin Scott, who found out he needed Textarea Cache the hard way. See all posts by Justin Scott.

15 comments

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  1. FeRD

    I use Lazarus ( http://lazarus.interclue.com/ or http://addons.mozilla.org/addon/6984 ) for the same purposes, and it’s saved me more times than I care to count.

    Lazarus has some nice features: It caches everything of interest for a configurable number of days (I lowered the default 14 days down to 5, to prevent the cache growing very large). It also stores the cache in an encrypted sqlite database, meaning it’s both secure and fast. For privacy, the entire cache can be emptied anytime the user chooses to. Finally, in case you need to restore something to a text area that Lazarus doesn’t automatically recognize as the original location, the full cache is searchable.

    March 26th, 2010 at 8:53 am

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  2. ifrit

    I’m using Lazarus too :) Must have!

    March 26th, 2010 at 10:39 am

    Reply

  3. Helen Neely

    This was one of the few things missing in web browsers. I will give it a spin now and see how it turns out.

    Nice job guys!

    March 26th, 2010 at 1:22 pm

    Reply

  4. SmoothPorcupine Pirate

    Sometimes you can right click -> Undo, to get the data back.

    March 26th, 2010 at 3:14 pm

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  5. dumbunny

    Dumbunnies are suckers for Easter eggs! I might try it just because I so enjoyed Justin’s narrative!

    March 26th, 2010 at 3:29 pm

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  6. Neil Rashbrook

    Real hackers decode the POST data from the session history entry ;-) I’ve done this on http://quotes.burntelectrons.org/submit more times than I want to remember.

    March 27th, 2010 at 4:52 am

    Reply

  7. questionaire

    Is it safe? Who says it can not collect everthing typed including passwords, credit card numbers etc. and directly send the information to the creator? I am just a bit careful…

    March 27th, 2010 at 9:14 am

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    1. Arvind

      Exactly. The reviewer conveniently brushed that important issue under the carpet.

      April 1st, 2010 at 2:36 am

      Reply

      1. Justin Scott

        As mentioned above, all add-ons featured on Rock Your Firefox have been reviewed by Mozilla and are safe to use. Textarea Cache stores all data locally on your computer, and nothing it saves is sent to any remote server.

        April 2nd, 2010 at 3:58 pm

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        1. Momus

          Are all add-ons featured on RockYourFirefox open source?

          What stops some other add-on to access the saved pieces, and decrypt them? Who has access to the decrypting algorithm/code…?

          No! Something this fundamental to browsing safety should be under the control of the browser with open source, not some unknown 3rd party.

          Of course, I use some other plug-ins. And while they have different “official” function, who knows if they don’t collect and keystrokes/passwords entered in the browser ?… Again, the safety feature preventing plugging to collect such data, should be designed into the browser. Existence of of textarea or Lazarus, etc.. plugins indicates that the FF browset is fundamentally unsafe.

          April 2nd, 2010 at 11:10 pm

          Reply

          1. Justin Scott

            Again, add-ons that aren’t marked as “experimental” on addons.mozilla.org and all add-ons featured on Rock Your Firefox have been reviewed by Mozilla. That means we make sure they don’t log keystrokes or tamper with other add-ons. And Textarea Cache only saves the large textarea fields like comment boxes, not small fields where sensitive data is usually entered.

            April 4th, 2010 at 5:27 pm

  8. Pingback from Linux Blog » Blog Archive » Nový web představuje zajímavé doplňky pro Firefox

    [...] a uživatel si ho může samozřejmě ihned stáhnout. Představeny byly již doplňky jako Textarea Cache pro pohodlnější práci s texty zadávanými do webových formulářů, WeatherBug pro [...]

    March 29th, 2010 at 1:44 am

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  9. Mel

    “Textarea Cache stores all data locally on your computer”

    That’s what I’m worried about. Even if the data is encrypted, my computer can be stolen and searched for passwords and credit card data. Doesn’t the thief simply have to go to the website where I logged in to get Textarea to fill in the form?

    This is why I actually feel safer keeping my passwords “offsite” on a remote secure server rather than on my computer.

    April 3rd, 2010 at 4:09 pm

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    1. Justin Scott

      Why would you enter passwords or credit card data in a textarea? This add-on only saves data entered into the large textarea boxes, not normal-sized fields that are used for credit cards and passwords.

      April 4th, 2010 at 5:21 pm

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  10. Hemiola SUN

    I am the author of Textarea Cache. This extension DOES NOT save all data. Your card number or password won’t be saved in the cache. It saves only what you type in a textarea, such like what you did here.

    January 23rd, 2011 at 5:40 pm

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