Have you hugged a Kevin today?

Yes that’s right, I have decided to be audacious and pompous enough to declare today, March 16 as “International Kevin Appreciation Day”! :p A day ahead of St. Patrick’s Day (which you have probably heard of ), I just thought I would take this brief (and albeit light-hearted) opportunity to tell you that, in my humble, though biased opinion, I have to say that Kevins in general kick ass, are cool, and are true (primarily) to the original Celtic roots of their name, which stems from the ancient Gaelic word “caoin,” meaning “tender, gentle, and kind….”

So, on that note, I return you to your “regular programming,” and I wish all of you a very happy and lucky St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow! .

[images obtained from this site]

Changed “Web Designers” to Web/Graphic Designers; changed “Social Media” to Social Media/Tech News.

“How to kill an application session when a browser window is closed?”

This code uses jQuery/Ajax in an absolutely brilliant and straightforward way. Basically what the code does is automatically load the contents of your “logoff.php” page, using the JavaScript window.onbeforeunload function (which is something that executes upon a user’s exiting the browser, refreshing the page, or submitting a form). Probably the most brilliant thing about this script is that it still uses the onbeforeunload function, BUT (and this was why it was of so much particular use to me for my particular case), let’s say that your web app page is relying on a form processor page that is on an external page, and not on the same page. If the user in this kind of case enters in their chat text, and then hits the submit button (but still is currently ON the page and actively participating in the current chat session), the typical onbeforeunload function if called, would execute (so basically, in this case, this would amount to the user being logged off every time he/she hit the “Post Message” button, and not JUST when the user closed the browser window).

So what this very clever script does is execute the contents of the script on your “logoff.php” page onbeforeunload, BUT excepts the following cases: (so it won’t get called if the user does the following things, and will only log the user out when he/she closes the browser window):

- Hitting the Submit button;
- Clicking a link.

[The "magical" thing I will add too, after thinking about it, is that your 'logout.php' web page does not even have to be currently loaded on the browser - after all, the browser is being closed, right? This script executes your code all at once - like I said, fantastic! One other slightly unfortunate thing I found too in my extensive testing was that: this script works fine in Firefox and IE (and worked in Google Chrome, after not working the first time, insanely enough, but did not work in Opera or Safari :S). My sort of work-around for this was to at least add in code to my log-in page that sets the user's status to offline right away, then online once they are logged on and enter the chatroom].

Anyway, hope what I said here makes sense and is not too muddled an explanation, and… here is the code!:

From there, you just need to save this text in a file called ‘autoLogoff.js’, and call it toward the top of your page with the following code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="js/autoLogoff.js"></script>

I am making this post because this information was REALLY hard to find when I was searching for it, in the hopes that it can help you out with a similar project!

Again, here is the original posting for more and complete information:

“How to kill an application session when a browser window is closed?”

[Already, I’d like to thank programmer Srinivas Tamada for this rockin’ code!

And additionally, very special thanks to Maruf for helping resolve an annoying IE issue:

After I modified the code, the stupid forced-caching issue of IE (which was delaying or not showing the updated list of all the latest posts) managed to get resolved. Here’s my modified code of the function:

<script>

var refreshId = setInterval(function() {
$("#page_refresh").load(‘show-comments.php?v=’+ Math.random());
}, 500);

</script>