Out of The Box But Not Lost in Cyberspace

These days, 90% of my writing takes place in web-based text boxes. You know, those small, cramped boxes on Blackboard, comment boxes on blogs, text-input fields on forms, the ones that students are loathe to type a character more than can fit in that 25-word field. (I'm not sure which is the chicken or the egg, but I notice my students have the same mindset when it comes to answering printed exam questions--the space I leave between the questions is the space to which they confine their answers.) These textboxes cramp my style and brain. Moreover, twice now I have lost my hard-typed words due to browser crashes or server "hiccups." (Not a bad record actually, given the amount of work I do online.) Nonetheless, infinite text horizons and virtual peace of mind have arrived with two new greasemonkey scripts-- Textarea Backup and Textarea Resize. Both scripts require Greasemonkey, of course, and work on all versions of Firefox.