Why You Shouldn’t Use Google Chrome With Squarespace

Ok, yes, this post is going to be full nerd, so apologies to my regular readers–I will make it up to you soon with something fun. You know, like an overview of Facebook’s most recent news feed changes or something equally entertaining. 😉

So you know that I recently purchased a Chromebook and that it’s now my main computer. You also may remember that about a year ago I moved this blog from Google Blogger to Squarespace 6. After my initial hurdles getting used to Squarespace, I’ve gotten more used to it and think it’s a great platform. I won’t lie and say I recommend it over WordPress, because for someone like me–casual blogger who is used to standard WYSIWYG content management system stuff like being able to switch from visual to code view and who likes the ease of plugins, WordPress is probably a better choice. But Squarespace is elegant and the support is incredibly good and I figured it’s good to push your comfort level and learn something new. So here I am on Squarespace, and I’ve learned how to do the stuff I didn’t originally know how to do and for the most part it’s been good.

Until recently. I generally use Chrome as a browser and now purchased a Chromebook, which means unless you know how to hack around it (which I don’t), you have one browser choice: Chrome. At any rate, the first time I was drafting a blog post in Squarespace, saved it, then opened it back up again only to find the page blank, I figured I’d done something like not actually saved it when I thought I had or accidentally highlighted all and backspaced then saved. I was pissed to have lost a whole post, but chalked it up to user error. The next time it happened, I was just pissed and I thought either I must be really stupid and am accidentally deleting posts then saving a blank file or it’s not me and it’s Squarespace. The THIRD time it happened the other night, I was just pissed and I knew it wasn’t me and was an issue with Squarespace.

Bottom line is that it is Squarespace and, as far as I know, I’m the only one to whom this is happening (my typical luck–remember my magnet fingers?). According to the very helpful support people at Squarespace, it’s probably being caused by one of the extensions I’m running on Chrome. They want me to let them know all the extensions I’m running so they can test it and want me to answer a bunch of questions and, while I appreciate their thorough-ness, I honestly just don’t have time. I barely have time to write this blog, let alone troubleshoot the back end of it. The bottom line? Using Squarespace in Chrome while you’re running extensions (not sure which one/s) can result in saved posts being lost.

So if by some chance you’re running into the same problem and have Googled “Squarespace 6 not saving posts” or some similar thing, just know that no, you’re not crazy and that apparently the fix is composing posts on some other platform then pasting into Squarespace to publish. Hardly a solution, IMO, but if I don’t have time to troubleshoot my blog platform I definitely don’t have time to migrate it to a different platform so basically a two-step blog writing process is what it’s going to have to be. Disappointing, especially for a platform that’s being touted as better than WordPress. WordPress might be buggy and not as elegant as Squarespace, but it’s never just deleted saved posts (at least not for me).