Lots More Done

I'm bleary eyed. Spent most of the weekend forging ahead. Yesterday morning June read the Apple stock price to me from the crawl under CNN. "The stock market's open? Isn't today Sunday?" Alas, no. I lost a day somehow.

But great things got done. Yesterday (Monday, formerly known as Sunday) I finished the publication module. You can save your work out of the database and direct people to a static URL to see your WebQuest. So far, only in one format, but adding the others won't take much.

Before that, I fixed the CSS so that the content part has a minimal height, using a trick I found here. Did the same thing to the tool layout so that the blue navigation bar goes all the way down to the bottom of the page. Also added a textured background to the tool so that it's not all blaringly white.

But today, most frabulous of all, I finally fixed the timeout problem. Something wacky was happening with the sessions variables on my site, probably because it's a shared server and somehow the actions of other sites being hosted there is messing with the garbage collection routines. That would cause session files to be erased at random intervals as short as 10 minutes, which meant that people would lose whatever was on the page that was open as QuestGarden no longer knew who they were (and therefore what row in the lesson table to store their stuff in.)

All fixed now. The trick was to change the parameters that control how sessions are handled, and to move where they were stored into my own private space away from the public /tmp folder. To do that I had to put three lines into every script where sessions were started. (Things got dicey for a few hours today until I realized that the login script I'm using dealt with sessions in its own way and I had to insert my fix there, too.)

For the record, the three lines are:
ini_set ('session.save_path', '/someotherfolder');
ini_set ('session.gc_maxlifetime', '4800');
ini_set ('session.gc_probability', '30');

I left June logged into the system and went out to dinner. When I came back her computer had still not timed out after an hour and a half. That should be plenty long. So... a major problem solved!

I've spiffed up the main menu that you arrive at when you log in now and changed the header from Alpha Test to Beta Test. Now I'm sending out invitations to some of those who first got accounts back in February, hoping they'll come back and surface any remaining bugs.

Looking good!