Sessionhandling and Fast-Blogging

Whoops? What’s that?! I’m going to be scared now, but „Your session will soon expire. We advise you to save your post.“ popped up all out of a sudden. Of course I understand the importance of security measures, but normally a session expires after 30 minutes or 1 hour, or usually if you log off from the computer or close your browser window. Nevertheless, the new Blogspirit alert window appears after 5 minutes (5*60*1000 in javascript as calculation). Don’t you think this is too short?

Especially people like me who browse the web while searching for blog-worthy content aren’t „Fast-Blogging“ within the given timeframe of each alert with 5, 10 or 15 minutes. Sometimes it is necessary to rethink a situation before you publish content, and each popup has been annoying. So far I received two of them since an entry takes its time. I’m sipping a cup of coffee or eat a snack, sometimes I read an article or consult other blogs to see how they refer to the topic, etc. Now I had to „Save as draft“ for the first time, because usually the session expiration never pulled me off. This was done because of a mixture of fear, anger and unsureness concerning the behavior of the blog’s admin interface if the third popup would notice me. The HTML source of the post.php told me it’s not going to auto refresh or close the window… phew!

But to protect people from being tweaked by others who get their hands on a PC in i.e. a computer lab or public office, I noticed a nice feature at Hotmail.com instead of the timeout event: Hotmail uses a small checkbox to let the user signal to the server if they reside at a public place or use somebody else’s computer (a very insecure place, checked) or if they are simply at home or use their private computer (a very secure place, unchecked). In any case, you have to manually hit the checkbox as it’s standard option remains on „unchecked“. And in the private situation, the session of hotmail may last very long… however the public session is rather limited.