Let me explain.
Have you ever entered information in a web form, like a long, well-crafted comment you’ve written for a student in your course management system? And then when you clicked “submit” you got a notice that your page had timed out, or that you lost your internet connection? Or maybe you didn’t get around to clicking submit before you accidentally closed or reloaded the webpage? In any case, your comment is gone. Irreparably gone. And you have to type it all over again. Or what you can remember of it. In case, you’re certain the words you are retyping are not nearly as good as what you wrote the first time.
Lazarus, a Chrome extension (and Firefox add-on), has become my new best friend.
To recover lost text from a form field, I click the ankh icon in the top right corner of the field, and Lazarus shows me what I typed in that field in a menu with a light purple background. I can also see a bunch of other content I’ve recently typed in other web form fields. I can select anything from the list. Mousing over an option gives me the entire text in white pop up box. Clicking that option enters it into the form field.
This has become very handy given how much time I spend entering comments and other text in boxes in my course management system. Just recently I entered comments into a rubric for a particular student and then moved on to the next student… without saving the comments for the previous student. Doh! When I went back to the previous student, all of my comments were gone. But then I clicked on the ankh icon, and there were all of my comments, ready to be resurrected.
Almost just as recently, I was completing an online conference registration form. One entry box asked for a 50-word statement about something. I wrote it. And then when I clicked submit, I learned that my internet had hiccupped. I got a page-timeout error. When I got reconnected to the internet, and reloaded the page… Yep. Everything was gone, including my concise, brilliant 50-word statement.
Unfortunately, that was before I had installed Lazarus.
But installing it was the very next thing I did.
