Code. Design. Explore.

From Pangea Day, May 10, 2008:

Pangea Day was a celebration of the power of film. It featured films that were funny, sad, gorgeous, stark – and powerful. Voices that had never been heard before. Things many had never seen. Scenes from worlds few had visited. A cross-section of our amazing, complicated, noisy, beautiful world.

Besides four hours of pure entertainment, Pangea Day offered a view into other lives. After Pangea Day – after having experienced life inside so many other heads – we hope that many were moved to action. To become involved in pressing issues. To share their own video and photos. To join discussions that might move the world just a little bit further toward understanding.

The films in this program were chosen by Pangea Day’s panel from more than 2,000 submissions and a long roster of curated suggestions. Together, these films moved us, frightened us, made us laugh and smile, and helped us feel closer to the world.

Find out more…

Jeff Atwood made an interesting comment on his blog, Coding Horror, about how to take advantage of AJAX to send sort-of heartbeat back to the server to keep the session from expiring. I think this is a great idea. Getting automatically logged out is extremely annoying (unless of course it’s my bank in which case I’m appreciative).

From his post:

As a user, I can say pretty unequivocally that session expiration sucks. Is it really so unreasonable to start doing something in your web browser, walk away for an hour — maybe even for a few hours — then come back and expect things to just work?

As programmers, I think we can do better. It is possible. I am inundated with session timeout messages every day from a variety of sources, but I’ve never once seen a session expiration message from gmail, for example. Here’s what I suggest:

Create a background JavaScript process in the browser that sends regular heartbeats to the server. Regenerate a new cookie with timed expiration, say, every 5 or 10 minutes.

Continue reading ‘Your Session Has Timed Out’…

The Presentation

Without presentation a web page is just text. In the early days of building web sites styles and colors were mixed with JavaScript and large animated gifs. Yes, during those days they were referred to as “web sites,” no one called them “web apps” yet. And to be frank, with all that work that went into it that hurt my feelings. Anyway, today I’m going to go beyond just showing how to get Mako working with your templates, but go as far as show you a better way to structure your templates in a Rails-like fashion.

I’m going to leave explain Mako to the developers, but in exchange I will give you some real examples.

Some of my methods are borrowed for Ruby on Rails. I essentially have 3 parts to my presentation layer — layouts, views, and elements.

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