Blue Sky On Mars

Thoughts on Building Software Products
September 5, 2005

Storing data on the browser

by Kevin Dangoor

Cookies have some pretty severe limitations in terms of the amount of data you can store. Besides, they get transmitted to the server on every request, so you don’t necessarily want to store a ton of data in there anyway.

On the other hand, using sessions on the server to store data for the current user is also a bad idea unless you have a small or very predictable user base. If you’ve got a heavily dynamic app and you want to scale it up somewhat linearly, you need to work with HTTP’s generally stateless model.

The Ajaxian blog points to a couple of posts by Brad Neuberg about keeping session state in the browser. Using AJAX and Brad’s techniques, you’re only sending the state back to the server when you need to, not every time as you do with cookies.

The quick trick (it’s worth linking through to Brad’s original article) is to store your “session” data in a text field in a form. (It must be in a form.) Brad tested in IE, Firefox and Safari and found that he could store data in all three, and it would still be there when he hit the back button. Additionally, he tried storing 1MB in both IE and Firefox and had no problem.

That can certainly solve session affinity problems, couldn’t it?

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September 5, 2005

Getting testimonials for your product

by Kevin Dangoor

John Jantsch has a great tip for getting quality testimonials for your product. The key is rather than asking for a testimonial directly, have a prospective customer ask a current customer for an opinion. You’ll end up with a better-written testimonial than if you had asked for one directly. I’ve never tried this myself, but I do believe this would work wonders.

September 5, 2005

Perspective: Being Poor

by Kevin Dangoor

John Scalzi provides an excellent perspective piece on Whatever: Being Poor. Something to consider, though: this is being poor in America. If you’re talking about poor in India, China, Africa or almost anywhere else in the third world, you can downgrade just about every one of these even further. Seriously, if you think “Being Poor” sounds depressing as written (and it likely does, for those of us reading and writing blogs), just transplant your brain to Africa as you read.

Being poor is not having a TV. Or a phone. Or electricity.

Being poor is walking miles to the market or to school, because there is no car.

Being poor is rocks and sticks for toys.

Being poor is thinking $1 an hour is a really good deal.

I’m not writing this to belittle the poor in the US. It is rough to be poor anywhere, and those of us above the poverty line are blessed. I just wanted to add to John’s excellent post a bit about just how good we have it here in the developed world.