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Building Intelligent sessions into your framework |
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Have you ever been logged into an application and had your session timeout, then when you log back in you are returned to a different place altogether?
This article deals with a way to mark where a user was in your application and return them to that location when they log back in. It also allows a user to deep link into an application. IE when they have a bookmarked link instead of being passed to the home page, they are passed through to their original destination.
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Using Feedburner RSS feeds with your Blog and auto tweeting to your Twitter Account |
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Feed burner is a Google product that allows you to consume and distribute your RSS feeds in a much more in depth way than simply displaying the information in a raw XML format. It allows you to analyse the usage of a feed, add social links into feed articles and push the content onto other web platforms, like Twitter and Facebook.
In this article I will display what I like to call the 'Distributed social circular'. This means that when you create a new Blog article feed burner will automatically consume it, update your RSS feed subscribers, and post a custom formatted Tweet to your Twitter account, hopefully driving more visitors to the original article.
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Flash content incompatibilities with lightbox’s and DHTML Div’s |
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I've seen the issue a few times in my travels where there is flash content on a page, and other content IE DHTML Div's has been triggered and the new content has slipped behind the flash in a really ugly way.
I found myself in this position building an image gallery with YouTube videos in it. Clicking on a lightbox link caused a flash video to show through the new lighbox pop up.
Like this: Test script showing flash messing up my lightbox.
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Blog redesign and a version update to BlogCFC 5.9.5 |
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I've been running an older version of Blog CFC for a while now, so I thought it was well past due an update to the latest version. It seemed like a good time to give the site a lick of paint, so I have de- web 2.0'd it. At some point I got swept up in the curved corners and shiny gradients of Web 2.0ness, and now I just plain don't like it.
If you didn't know already you can get BlogCFC from RIA forge here: http://blogcfc.riaforge.org/. There seem to have been some nice tweaks in the last few versions, and it's nice to see a software application maturing.
In the process of redesigning the site I came across this recent survey of the installed user base for windows fonts. It is always risky for a developer to use a non standard font, so surveys like this are ideal. http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-WindowsResults.shtml
Also I had a little Photoshop help creating the image header. Here is a pretty painless Photoshop tutorial on "Fade Images in Photoshop Using Layer Masks", http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/photoshop-fade-layer-mask
Lastly I've added some Feedburner integration. Feedburner is a great way of consuming your RSS feeds, it adds a whole load of options, and allows you to push feed content out to other community sources, such as Twitter or FaceBook. It also provides stats, a la Google Analytics style, and its free (requires a Google account)! http://feedburner.google.com.
I think I took two things away from this redesign. Firstly, double check your CSS. The only real issues I had during the entire process were CSS related (thanks IE). Secondly index your database properly. I'm not sure if the previous install was indexed at all, or whether the new version just has better indexing in the installation scripts, but the performance difference is notably quicker!
