A look at sessions

Handling sessions in PHP can be a bit of a challenge. They like to just disappear at random, which makes it hard to set a specific time limit for user’s sessions to expire. The reason for this is that PHP stores each client session as a separate file and then occasionally picks through them and deletes the sessions that are expired. This is a common process in software called garbage collection. Every time a user starts a session on your site (basically every page request) there’s a chance that the garbage collection process with run. You can control how likely this is to happen by setting a couple of PHP options:

ini_set('session.gc_probability', 1);
ini_set('session.gc_divisor', 100);

or you can set these in a php.ini file:

session.gc_probability = 1
session.gc_divisor = 100

This works by taking the gc_probability and dividing by the gc_divisor, so in this case 1/100 is 0.01 or 1.00% chance of running garbage collection.

The other important setting for handling user sessions is session.gc_maxlifetime. This is set to the amount of seconds a session must age before it is considered expired and therefor able to be garbage collected (deleted). So you may have something like this in your php.ini file:

session.gc_probability = 1
session.gc_divisor = 100
session.gc_maxlifetime = 86400

Continue reading →

During the process of (re)building this site in WordPress I was trying to come up with ideas for the sidebar. I used to have a widget that showed a random image from a folder, which was cool but a little limited. What if it could be expanded to pull an image from the entire internet? Introducing the Completely Random Widget. This is the first project I have submitted to the WordPress Plugin Directory. You can see it in action on the sidebar of this site. In essence it is a sidebar widget that uses Google images to find a totally random image from the web and display it on your site. You can check it out it’s page in the Plugin Directory, give it a try on your site! This site is running a custom version that archives each image that gets displayed, and I’ve set up a Random Image Archive Page so you can see every image that the widget has ever displayed on this site! Give this plugin a try and let me know what you think!

[UPDATE: This seems to no longer work. On the up side, YouTube is doing automatic bandwidth detection so videos will often switch to HD automatically after a few seconds on a good connection]

Recently I was helping out with the Customer Dish learning center where we needed to embed some HD YouTube videos. We wanted to embed them as HD so the user did not have to hit play and then select the better quality. Turns out the hd=1 option does not work anymore, the new player automatically selects the ‘best’ resolution for the size of the embed, which is 480p or lower when your embed size is less than about 850px wide.

But there is good news! The old player is still avaliable and allows you to embed in HD regardless of size. The new player is version 3.0, you want 2.0. Here’s how to get it:

1. On your video hit Share to get to the embed code
2. Check Use Old Embed Code and Play in HD
3. Copy the code and put it on your site
4. Replace both instances of version=3 with fs=1 in the code

Now you should be good to go! Your videos will load in HD automatically and also have a full screen button. If you want to skip the work you can plug in the video ID in the box below and I’ll generate the code for you!

There you have it, YouTube videos embeded in HD regardless of the embedded size.

If this helped you out be sure to comment or like!

So I was curious about when the best time to post something to Facebook was. So I created a script that spoofs my browser information and logs into Facebook. Then it scrapes the number of friends I have online from the chat bar at the bottom of the screen. The script runs every 5 minutes, 24-hours a day, and stores the number of friends I have online in a database.

I used the first week of readings to create the graph above. I find it fascinating! Every day follows the same basic shape with Monday and Tuesday seeing by far the most activity. Then it steadily decreases until the least popular day, Saturday. I’m really interested to see what next week looks like, will it be similar? I have posted the page that shows the real-time data here, so check it out if you want to see more!