Cookies

Just wanted to share a quick experience I had today. I have about 5 different browsers installed on my laptop (Firefox, IE7, Chrome, Opera, Safari), and today I was seeing some weird behavior. I work for a company, The American Academy, that uses Drupal for a lot of it's development. I was only able to sign in to the site using Firefox. None of the other browsers were working. When I would try to sign in, I got no errors, and it would try to redirect me as if I was logged in, but I wasn't. I cleared all of my cached data, and reinstalled all the browsers, and so forth...

I determined that cookies weren't be set as they needed (internet cookies are the way to track that a user has visited your site and keep small pieces of date about that user for when they return). The cookie that said I was logged in was being created only in Firefox, but not in any of the other browsers. After about a 3 hour excursion to find the answer, we found it.

Every 2 weeks or so my computer runs an update and changes the time back one hour from the actual time. That means that I have to manually change the time. This past time, it turns out that I changed the month ahead as well. Here is what it said:

It is certainly not November. It turns out that Firefox is the only browser that doesn't use the local machine time to handle cookies, and so it was working fine. All of the other browsers were setting the time of the cookie as if it was 3 months from now when I returned, meaning that I was automatically logged out. Changing the date back to September did the trick and I am back in business.

What do you read?

Living in this digital age has brought about so much information online. I read everything online basically (except for school textbooks). There are so many sites to visit and new things to be posted everyday. There is so much to take in and so little time to do so.

A couple of weeks ago I had about 15 sites that I would visit at least once a day. Besides Slickdeals, there were several blogs I would check and then news sites and a few others. Checking all those sites takes forever. The biggest pain is that half the time there isn't anything new on the sites (especially on people's blogs), so that means that I was just wasting time. About this time I was doing a project for work with Google Alerts. Somehow I came across this awesome service that Google offers: Google Reader!



If you look at the screenshot above, you will see that I have all of my sites divided by category on the bottom left and then all of the new stuff on each site shows up on the right. I can narrow down what I want to see from just "Blogs" to a single site. The nicest thing about this service is that I can visit 1 site, see everything that is new, and move on.

As a quick note, the site must have an RSS feed. For blogs, the blog must be public or you won't be able to connect to the RSS feed. Lastly, mine is all color coded, but that does not come standard with Google Reader. That is because of a nice Firefox addon, Better GReader. I know there are other similar services out there, so if you know of something better let me know. Oh yeah, it only checks for updates at most every 5 minutes, but may check less frequently depending on the RSS settings of the site it is checking. You have no control over that though. Check it out. It is definitely worth your time.

Fire and foxes go together!

As most of you know, I am a major geek. I am a web developer, so I have lots of time to review the newest and coolest technology out there. So lately I have been watching what browsers that my visitors use (along with a lot of other information that I find really cool). At some post in the future I will explain how you can easily find out all this cool information about visitors to your blog (or any other site that you have control of for that case).

However, I just had to say that Firefox rules. I know that most of my readers visit my site using Firefox, so most of you must agree with me. I think most everyone knows that Internet Explorer is one of the worst browsers. If you don't believe me, then check this out. Let's just say that I try to avoid IE if at all possible. It is slow and so crappy!

There are tons of reasons to love Firefox. First off, you can make it look like any browser you want. So if you have and love IE7 (I know at least a couple of my readers use this browser), you can download Firefox, download a skin for it, and voila, you have Firefox that looks just like Safari (or any other browser you can think of). Now, you have one of the fastest browsers, but now comes the cool part - ADDONS! I love these things. I have addons for everything imaginable. I can't even imagine life without them.

So, if you aren't convinced, then you should at least try it. Firefox is available on every operating system as far as I am aware which is better then all other browsers except Opera which also supports all the major operating systems. Watch for another post as well about creating custom buttons for Firefox. Very cool, and very easy. Check it out. Firefox rules!!

My 3 favorite addons:
Faviconize, Fast Dial, Foxmarks

Other reasons to love Firefox:
Address Bar (Find any site you visited very easily)
Memory use is very good
Spell checking
Undo closed tabs
Configuration galore (meaning; I can almost change anything and everything to my personal needs & wants)
Did I mention addons? You can make it act like your favorite browser with any tweaks that you want.